Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice?

Presenting work by Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor, Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? asks what we are afraid of in the pursuit of justice for all workers— does the fear lie in the pursuit itself? Or is it the workers, often coded as monstrous and non-human, that are terrifying? What would it mean to embrace that label, and welcome being the thing that goes bump in the night? How have we been rendered alien from nature, one another, our bodies, and ourselves? And what would it take to mend this? Through a multi sensorial-scape, the exhibition explores and unravels memory, the naming of fear, presence and absence, and the ways capitalism impacts how we show up, or become ghosts, in our own bodies and worlds. As we reckon with this, what lingers and haunts us through the cycles of revolutionary efforts that propel us forward?

Curated by Furqan Mohamed.

Established in 1981, Charles Street Video (CSV) is a non-profit production organization dedicated to supporting media artists. CSV fosters the creation of media art, encourages experimentation, and develops an artistic community in Toronto. CSV is the city’s leading media arts production centre where emerging and established artists gather to achieve their artistic visions. CSV provides affordable access to equipment and post-production editing facilities for creating videos, films, installations and other media art forms. They also commissions artists to create new works, and sponsors a variety of youth-oriented production programs and post-secondary scholarships. CSV actively participates in local exhibitions of media art through partnerships with arts organizations and grassroots festivals.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer, educator, and arts worker from Toronto. She is interested in all things culture, kinship, and abolition. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Local, where she was an inaugural Journalism Fellow and 2022 Digital Publishing Award nominee, Maisonneuve, C Mag, and Canthius. You can find her poetry as part of the “Poems in Passage” project on the TTC, and a 2022 artist residency with inPrint Collective in collaboration with the Mackenzie House museum. She loves asking “Who’s Afraid?” as often as she can, chatting about poetry and translation, especially when working on sales and community for trace press, and is currently completing her graduate studies at OISE at the University of Toronto.

Nahomi Amberber is a writer, collage artist and community researcher. As a writer, Nahomi is currently exploring the poetics of Blackness as it manifests as joy, togetherness and grief. Nahomi’s collages weave together similar themes through pointed found imagery that plays with materiality and voice. Their research explores the “conditions for life, community and sovereignty” (Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny). This has taken the form of the Defund the Police website and We Know What We Need policy platform while working at Black Lives Matter – Canada.Nahomi writes and plays with her trusted communities in tkaronto, a word used by one of the many Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land to mean “the place in the water where the trees are standing.

Saysah moves through the world with a deep intention to be in right relationship with their body, their community and the land. They are always in the process of (un)becoming—an ever-evolving learner, maker, and mover. As a multi-sensorial artist, Saysah’s journey weaves together different forms of expression, all guided by sensory exploration. Their practice is one of disruption; peeling back the layers of knowledge systems and re-membering what has been left for us. Through their work, they build spaces for co-creation, where community-building, ritual-theatre, and archive come together in a shared approach. These elements are deeply informed by their earth-work teachings, where land and water are vital teachers and collaborators — honouring these guides, moving with a commitment to reciprocity. 

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Her work appears in art exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.