Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? with Farah Ghafoor

Join Farah Ghafoor for an outdoor poetry performance of  “The Whistleblower”, accompanying the exhibition Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice?, curated by Furqan Mohamed. Farah is interested in labour as a measure of value in the context of capitalism, climate change, and colonialism. “The Whistleblower” interrogates the narratives we’ve been told about solidarity, the systems we accept, and the infiltration of corporations into our private lives. 

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.

Presented with Charles Street Video (CSV), 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.

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.