Each year Mayworks commissions an artist to develop the poster art for our annual festival. This year, Ibrahim Abusitta carries the tradition forward.

“For this year’s Mayworks Festival poster, I wanted to paint an image of what real, physical solidarity looks like. I painted a line of dock workers, arms linked tight, standing their ground against this massive cargo ship belching smoke into the sky. It’s my tribute to those port workers around the world who’ve looked at a ship full of weapons and said, ‘Not on our watch.’ They understand that their labour is power, the power to stop shipments that fuel war and genocide.

Being Palestinian, watching what’s happening in the world right now has been devastating. There’s a grief in this piece, for sure. But what really drove me to make this poster was hope. When you look at the scale of these machines of war, it’s easy to feel small, like nothing you do could possibly matter. This painting is pushing back against that feeling. It’s a reminder that when working people organize, when we actually stand together, we have this incredible power to block the gears and disrupt the systems that are hurting us all. We’re not as small as they want us to think.”

Ibrahim Abusitta is a Palestinian-Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. His painting practice examines the intersections of personal archive and political history, with a focus on cultural memory and the nuances of diasporic identity. He is the 2025 recipient of the Laura Ciruls Painting Prize. His work has been featured on the cover of Briarpatch magazine and in the book A Year on the Abyss of Genocide by Mahmoud Al Shaer (ARP Books). Abusitta has exhibited across Canada and the United States.