Pleasure Dome, Toronto, ON (2026)

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! Thursday, September 25, Innis Town Hall, Doors at 6:30pm/Event at 7pm ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening.✨

🌱Sankofa, directed by Ian Keteku and Komi Olafimihan🌟

A poetic Afrofuturist film presented in five tableaux: Sankofa—Reach Back and Get It, Revolution, Reparations, Thomas Sankara Movement (Sankaraism), and Anti-Black Racism. This experimental short film provides context to a poem by the artist, featured in his book “Three Hundred Poems.”

Ian Keteku is a writer and multimedia artist who has written and directed projects for The National Film Board of Canada, CBC, PBS, and Sesame Street. An award-winning poet, Keteku is also the 2010 World Poetry Slam Champion.

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! Thursday, September 25, Innis Town Hall, Doors at 6:30pm/Event at 7pm ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening.✨

🟥 African American Express by Sydnie Baynes 🟥

African American Express is an abstract animation exploring the impact of consumerism in the Black community. Drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda and Robert E. Weems’ 1998 novel Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century, Baynes critiques patterns of excessive materialism and their ties to identity, capitalism, and cultural heritage. Through bold visual metaphors and symbolism, the film invites viewers to reflect on the cultural and political implications of consumption. From the artist: “Some of my favorite short films are animated Soviet propaganda films. I grew up watching these films from a young age.”

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening, Thursday, September 25, at Innis Town Hall.✨

🌀 The Rod and the Ring by Iraqi-Canadian artist Hala Alsalman 🌀

The conjoined rod and ring—an ancient Mesopotamian symbol held by divine beings—appears across millennia of cylinder seals and wall reliefs. Scholars still debate its meaning; one recent theory suggests it embodies the dual nature of time: the finite and the eternal.

Filmed across Iraq, this dreamlike film explores the rod and ring’s potent symbolism and how it could manifest in the future.

Hala Alsalman is an Iraqi-Canadian multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in both journalism and filmmaking. Her art practice is grounded in questioning gender relations, political power and history-making through collage, cinema and ceramics. As an MFA candidate at OCAD U, her thesis proposed dreaming as an archeological method for excavating possible futures were lost ancient wisdom resurfaces. Her films include Bêtes Humaines (2011), funded by TV5 Québec and selected at Newport Beach and Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois, and Haifa Street (2017), co-written and co-produced with Mohanad Hayal, winner of awards at Doha, Cairo, Busan, and Carthage.

Join us tonight (Thursday, September 25) at Innis Town Hall for The Rod and the Ring and other new works by Toronto’s moving-image artists.

📍 Innis Town Hall
📅 Thursday, Sept 25 — Doors 6:30pm, Screening 7:00pm
🎟️ Free admission, non-ticketed

08/30/2025

Don’t miss “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” by Sepideh Farsi at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. We’re thrilled to co-present this screening on Saturday, September 27 at 5:00 pm. Get your tickets at www.tpff.ca

At the beginning of the genocide, Iranian-exiled director Sepideh Farsi naively sought a way into Gaza to cover the unfolding genocide. In the course of her failed mission, a contact connected her with acclaimed Palestinian photographer and poet Fatma Hassona. While the two had differing views on religion, Middle East politics and exile, their curiousity of each other’s lives resulted in an unlikely friendship over the course of their regularly scheduled glitchy video calls. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk offers an intimate, first-hand perspective on life under genocide in Gaza, through the video calls between Sepideh and Fatma. Tragically, Fatma was killed with her family, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on her home on April 16, 2025 - just one day after she celebrated the announcement of the film’s selection at Cannes. Combining raw immediacy with deep humanity, the film portrays daily life during the genocide through the eyes of a young Palestinian caught in a lifetime of Israeli military aggression and siege.

08/01/2025

On now through August 10 (online through the Pleasure Dome website, link in bio). 🗺️ Dislocated Visions: Experiments in Representing Place brings together ten works by artists from Canada and internationally who engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body—these works attend in experimental ways to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.

Seen here: (1-3) Ella Morton, Crushed Between Ocean and Sky, 2023; (4) Ayla Dmyterko, On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, 2023; (5) Jaime Black and Lindsay Delaronde, When Land and Body Merge, 2020

07/19/2025

🎥Pleasure Dome Online Screening: August 1-8 🗺️ Dislocated Visions📍This programme brings together ten artists who engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body—these works attend in imaginative ways to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.

Stills: (1-2) Panu Johansson, “Who Has Seen The Wind”; (3-4) Francesca Svampa, “Water and More Water”; (5-6) Warren Chan, “Pixels of the Orient”

07/19/2025

🎥Pleasure Dome Online Screening: August 1-8 🗺️ Dislocated Visions📍This programme brings together ten artists who engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body—these works attend to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.

Stills here are from Petra Totten’s “my body is a place, just like any other,” 33:06, 2022

Making her way across the deserts of North America in search of a place she can find herself reflected, Carrie muses on her identity through memories, stories, and conversations with people in the trans* community to uncover what it means to have an embodied experience in the world.

03/14/2025

🎥 Pleasure Dome is *pleased* to co-present Emilia Beatriz’s expansive debut feature, barrunto (2024) at this year’s edition of the Toronto Q***r Film Festival (TQFF) !

When: Saturday, March 29 at 6:30pm-8:00pm EST

Where: In-person at the Tranzac Club & online at TQFF.ca

The short film through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me will be followed by the feature presentation of barrunto.
 through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me • Morgan Sears-Williams • 4 min • Canada • 2024

barrunto • Emilia Beatriz • 70 min • Puerto Rico/UK • 2024

Blending digital, archival, and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto never settles, drifting from the streets of Puerto Rico, to the sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, and even as far as the bottom of the ocean and the planet Uranus. Poetic and ruminating, barrunto is a shifting response and attempt to think through the embodied ethics and interdependence of co-existence between human and non-human.

Contains flashing images and may not be suitable for photosensitive viewers.

03/04/2025

Pleasure Dome welcomes submissions for our annual New Toronto Works screening, 2025 edition. In order to be eligible, the artist must be based in Toronto and the work must have been made in the last 12 months prior to the deadline. The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2025 (11:59 pm EST). The FilmFreeway link is accessible through our website (pdome.org) and is included as the link in our IG bio.

03/04/2025

🌱Pleasure Dome is looking for a Secretary, Board of Directors to begin the role this spring. Are you someone who is detail-oriented and highly organized? Are you passionate about, and knowledgeable of, artist-run culture in Canada? Are you keen to collaborate with other artists, curators, and arts professionals in Toronto, support media arts practices, and grow in your understanding of Board governance? Are you someone who loves to take notes? Please be advised that it is the secretary’s primary role and responsibility to attend monthly board meetings and record detailed minutes in writing at those meetings.

Please direct any questions to [email protected]

The deadline is immediate, open until filled 🌱

01/04/2025

NOTICE is hereby given that the Annual General Meeting of the Members of PLEASURE DOME is called for and will be held ONLINE on Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 7:00 pm ET. As our membership, your vote at this meeting is vital to the health of our organization. We hope you will join us.

PLEASURE DOME ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING (AGM), for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2024

When: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 7:00 pm ET

Where: Zoom

Please email the Executive Director ([email protected]) in advance to confirm your attendance and request the Meeting Passcode

Please note you must be a member in good standing before January 1, 2024 to vote at the AGM

We are keeping this meeting to 1 hour and requesting that any additional business be submitted in advance. To add an item to our agenda, you can send your request and a brief description to [email protected]. Please see the agenda below to familiarize yourself with the items for approval in advance of the meeting.

Can’t make the meeting? We NEED your proxy vote! Please email [email protected] to say that you are giving your proxy vote to one of the chairs of the meeting (Sadaf Khajeh and Abisola Oni, current Board co-chairs), or the name of any other member of Pleasure Dome (who is in good standing) who will be in attendance.

The full agenda for the meeting can be accessed on our website pdome.org

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