Part of The Gathering Divergence Multi-Arts Festival & Conference Spring 2026
📅 May 12, 14, and 15, 2026
📍 Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre
877 Yonge St, Toronto, ON M4W 3M2

This three-day hybrid festival and conference centers Indigenous, Black, racialized, Deaf, disabled, Mad, women, and other historically marginalized artists and arts communities.

Featuring performances, literary readings, visual arts exhibitions, panels, workshops, and creative investigations across diverse artistic practices, Gathering Divergence is grounded in cross-sectoral understandings of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Pluralism (EDIP). The festival explores transformative change in the arts through critical reflection, collaboration, and visionary practice.

The exhibition takes place in the Rehearsal Hall at the Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre. Exhibition is free and open to the public. 

Exhibition Hours

Artists

Anupa Khemadasa

Anupa Khemadasa is a Sri Lankan-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and musician whose work moves through layered terrains of memory, identity, and transformation. Working across painting, drawing, sound, and mixed media, she creates hybrid, symbolic worlds where bodies merge with flora, fauna, and myth—spaces where boundaries soften and new forms of becoming emerge.

Rooted in a transnational experience, her practice reflects the quiet tensions and resonances of inhabiting multiple cultural and psychological landscapes. As a BIPOC artist, she engages with inherited histories and lived realities, exploring how identity is shaped through displacement, resilience, and imagination.

Khemadasa has presented work in exhibitions and public art contexts in Toronto and Sri Lanka, including large-scale immersive installations for Nuit Blanche. Alongside her studio and musical practice, she contributes to community-based arts initiatives that foster dialogue around equity and representation.

Her work invites viewers and listeners into intimate, shifting spaces—where multiplicity is held, and transformation is ongoing.

www.anupakhemadasa.com

Lita

Lita (they/them) is a self-taught multimedia artist currently residing in Durham Region. lita is a self-ascribed Mad/disabled Black queer spoonie. lita uses art as a means of catharsis for themself and others with a focus on other Black queer Mad/disabled femmes as a way to find relationship through experiences where they do not see themselves represented.

Sara Oveissi

Sara Oveissi is a Toronto-based Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist working across photography, film, and mixed media. Her practice explores the emotional and psychological impact of displacement, identity, and systemic control, often drawing from personal and collective experiences shaped by migration and sociopolitical conflict.

With a background in photography and film production, Sara’s work blends narrative and visual experimentation to create immersive, emotionally charged pieces that center marginalized perspectives, particularly those of women navigating structures of power, tradition, and autonomy. Her projects have been exhibited internationally, including at Berlin Art Week, and span gallery installations, short films, and independent publications.

Through her work, she seeks to make visible the internal states of fear, memory, and resilience, inviting audiences to confront the invisible consequences of inequity while imagining new forms of connection and understanding.

www.oveissi.ca

Yafang Shi

Yafang Shi is a Chinese settler living in Aurora, on the treaty lands of the Mississaugas and Chippewas. She is a feminist, journalist-turned-artist, and poet whose practice explores gender, race, class, censorship, body, identity, and human-nature relations through a decolonial, intersectional, and transnational feminist lens. Her work spans an ongoing long-term documentary project on social movements for women’s rights and social justice which began in 2017, poetic and emotionally driven creative works, and socially engaged, collaborative public installations.

Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across art galleries, museums, universities, public libraries, community spaces, and outdoor public sites, including exhibitions at the CONTACT Photography Festival. Her solo exhibitions have been hosted by the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University.

Through both her artistic and advocacy practices, she continues to champion artists’ rights to freedom of expression and human rights.

About EMILIA-AMALIA

EMILIA-AMALIA is an intersectional, intergenerational, feminist experimental working group, initiated in Toronto in 2016. The group takes its name and structure from the practice of affidamento—the relationship in which one woman entrusts herself symbolically to another.

Learn more at:
www.emilia-amalia.com

About Chinese Feminism Toronto

Chinese Feminism Toronto is a grassroots collective engaged in feminist advocacy, transnational activism, and community-based organizing in relation to Sinophone and East Asian feminist and queer movements.

Follow their work on Instagram at @cnfeminismto.

Accessing the Building

The entrance to the Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre is downstairs and the door is locked. Please ring the bell and wait to be let in during exhibition hours.

For stair-free access, please go to the main floor and ask the concierge for access to the basement level.

For more accessibility information about the Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre, including barrier-free access details, please visit:
https://jackmanperformance.ca/how-to-find-us/

For more information about the conference click here

Conference registration: 

• Tuesday, May 12 – Online only
  Register: https://Gathering-Divergence-Spring-2026.eventbrite.ca
• May 14–15 – Hybrid
• In-person at the Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre
  Register: https://tapestryopera.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/events/a0SOF000002aPZp2AM
• Online – Register: https://Gathering-Divergence-Spring-2026.eventbrite.ca

We aim to host a fragrance-free event. Please do not wear perfume, cologne, or other scented products.

Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the City of Toronto, and the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.