What's Going on in the North End: Nocturne Art-at-Night Festival
- info453249
- Oct 10
- 9 min read
The Nocturne Art-at-Night Festival is October 16th to 19th, 2025.
Nocturne: Art-at-Night is the free, contemporary art festival that happens annually in Halifax, and is Atlantic Canada's largest art festival! This year, the festival will take place October 16th to 19th, with the main event happening on Saturday, October 18th from 6:00pm - 12:00am.
For those seeking a lively and immersive cultural adventure, the North End of Halifax during the Nocturne Art-at-Night Festival is an unmissable destination. This annual celebration turns the city into an expansive art gallery, with streets, parks, and public spaces bursting with creativity and expression. Here’s a peek at what awaits you in North End Halifax on this enchanting evening:
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Propeller Nocturne Launch Party
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 9:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Propeller Brewing Company (2015 Gottingen Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Description: Join Nocturne to kick off the 2025 festival with our friends at Propeller Brewing!
Nocturne's annual Launch Party takes place on Thursday, October 16 from 9PM-midnight at Propeller Brewing on Gottingen St.
Live music will be brought to you by CALAS + Friends!
While you're there, make sure to get your hands on the Nocturne Gin Smash! Crafted by Propeller with a special can design by Alex McKaskill, the Nocturne Gin Smash is available for a limited time only.
Created by: Nocturne art-at-Night, Propeller Brewing, CALAS & Alex MacAskill
Propeller Brewing Presents: The Dream Zone
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 9:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Propeller Brewing Company (2015 Gottingen Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Description: A decorative and interactive installation on the Propeller patio that brings the illustrated psychedelic dreamzone featured on Propeller’s Nocturne Gin Smash can to life. Come by and listen to music, enjoy a drink, and take some photos in the reactive mutated Earth that spawns the creatures and landscapes we deserve...
Created by: Alex MacAskill
Friday, October 17, 2025
Propeller Brewing Presents: The Dream Zone
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 12:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Propeller Brewing Company (2015 Gottingen Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Description: A decorative and interactive installation on the Propeller patio that brings the illustrated psychedelic dreamzone featured on Propeller’s Nocturne Gin Smash can to life. Come by and listen to music, enjoy a drink, and take some photos in the reactive mutated Earth that spawns the creatures and landscapes we deserve...
Created by: Alex MacAskill
We All Meet at Food: Community Picnic
Date: Friday, October 17, 2025
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Hope Blooms (2346 Brunswick Street)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
Description: Join us for a community night picnic, 7pm-9pm at Hope Blooms!
About the Project:
We all Meet at Food includes the growth and harvesting of food from several local garden spaces, accompanied by a series of free public workshops by Nova Scotia-based artists whose practices are centred on local food, agriculture and sustainability practices.
Workshops will be aligned to Nocturne’s 2025 theme Ground, selected by curator Marite Kuus: “Gardeners, mycologists, walkers, archeologists and geologists, road workers, settlers; we all have a different relationship with this space which we interact with daily, and applicants are encouraged to consider the multitude of possible meanings of this theme.”
Saturday, October 18, 2025
North End Noc-Tour
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Start & End Point: Propeller Brewing (2015 Gottingen Street)
Tour Schedule: 6:00, 8:00, 10:00 PM
Distance: 3.0 km (Approximately 48 minutes of walking time)
Description: Presented by long-time Nocturne sponsor Propeller Brewing, this tour has everything you could hope for in the North End! Experience a live performances, a participatory workshop, outdoor installations, storytelling and more. The loop will start and end at Propeller Brewing where you can enjoy the brand new Nocturne Gin Smash (available for a limited time only) and sit amongst Alex MacAskill's immersive installation based on his can design.
Propeller Brewing Presents: The Dream Zone
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 12:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Propeller Brewing Company (2015 Gottingen Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Description: A decorative and interactive installation on the Propeller patio that brings the illustrated psychedelic dreamzone featured on Propeller’s Nocturne Gin Smash can to life. Come by and listen to music, enjoy a drink, and take some photos in the reactive mutated Earth that spawns the creatures and landscapes we deserve...
Created by: Alex MacAskill
Marked by Nature
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Artists' Quarter (2594 Agricola Street)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
Description: Come and experiment with us as we explore the use of natural dyes and inks for drawing, writing, and mark-making. Using a variety of papers that have been marked by the natural urban environment we will be using organic mark-making tools to decorate bookmarks that visitors can take home.
We are exploring the process of making various natural dyes and inks using organic elements from our own urban environment and using those on a variety of papers that have been marked by the natural urban environment. Using these inks along with organic mark-making tools like feather quills, flowers, twigs, etc, we will invite visitors to help us decorate the papers and make bookmarks that everyone can take home.
Created by: Nova Scotia Book Arts Group, Rhonda Miller & Sally Crawford
Real Estate Agent vs. the Angel of History
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Bus Stop Theatre Parking Lot (2248 Maitland Street)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible - Outdoor viewing
Description: A video projects onto the stark blank wall of a property development. Two monologuing puppets present opposed perspectives on memory, progress, and the processes that transform the ground beneath their feet.
Real Estate Agent vs the Angel of History is a narrative installation that combines video and sculpture. It tells the story of two puppets, who serve as vehicles to explore our different, conflicting relationships with land and time.
The puppets are installed as sculptures inside a minivan. From inside the van, a video projects out onto a wall near a construction site. In the video, the Realtor invites you (the audience) on a virtual tour of a high-end property that will soon go up on the ground you are standing on. He draws you in, eager to sell you his vision of a beautiful and luxurious future — or is he just trying to prove his self-worth?
But the Realtor’s sales pitch is disrupted by the Angel of History, a magical being who remembers everything that has ever happened. His constant interjections flummox the Realtor, as the Angel recalls vivid but mundane scenes from the lives of people who have lived on this site over the years. The Angel is small and defenseless in the face of the forces of 'progress' — like a bird buffeted by hurricane-force winds. Despite this, he treasures the places that have been destroyed to make way for new developments, and he seeks to salvage their memories.
How can we reckon with the human motivations that drive housing instability and gentrification? When a new building goes up, what can we do to hold onto what was there before? With this installation, we hope to offer a moment of stillness and reflection to audience members who move, every day, through an urban landscape which is transforming at a breakneck speed.
The Angel’s monologue will draw from local accounts, archives, and Mi’kmaq history. An interactive element will invite festival-goers to add to the Angel’s story by recording their own memories of treasured places they can no longer access.
Created by: Emma Chapman-Lin & Charlie MacLean
Prepare the Ground for Kindness
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00pm
Location: Hermes Gallery (5682 North Street)
Accessibilty: Not wheelchair accessible
Description: The title for this HERMES member's group exhibition is a line from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 poem “To Those Born Later” when he had fled fascist oppression in Germany. Making art, then as now, is an act of positivity when things look dark.
As suggested by HERMES’ member Robert Bean, the title for this exhibition is a line from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Those Born Later”.
The poem was written in 1939 during Brecht’s exile in Denmark. It chronicles what Brecht refers to as “the dark times”. He had fled the fascist oppression in Germany for fear of losing his life. This one line from the poem however, offers a glimmer of hope for a world to come.
To make art in dark times is often an act of resistance and survival in itself. As a self-funded and collectively-governed artists’ cooperative, HERMES’ artists contribute work to Nocturne (Art at Night) that envisions a sustainable, kinder, and brighter day.
Created by: HERMES Artists
Igneous Skins: An Earthen Recharge
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00pm
Location: Circulate (5675 Cunard Street)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
Description: IIgneous Skins: An Earthen Recharge is an experiential immersive ritual inviting visitors to the center of the earth and back to surface with heat, stones and groundwaters wayfinding through matters that matter. Ground into the archives of the buried earth waves stories, sounds and songs.
Set in a wood-fired mantle comfortably holding up to 10 people on three levels. Held between crust and core, wafts circulate between surfaces and roots emitting raw scents of rumblings and curiosities.
A sensorial immersive ritual to recharge and merge earth bodies with great honour and care.
Guided journeys begin on the hour, and last for 15-20 minutes. Outdoor
screening and gallery is open for self-directed exploration all evening.
*For the guided journey on the hour, participants sit on wooden benches on one of three levels with temperatures ranging from 60-65C (top level), 50-55C(middle level), and 40-45C (floor level).
Created by: Circulate
Untitled - (Clock Piece)
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm -12:00pm
Location: Staples Parkade (Enter parkade off Cogswell street) 2003 Gottingen Street
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
Description: Untitled (Clock – Piece) is a durational performance installation exploring time, labor, and ecological decay through movement, light, and elemental materials arranged in a clock-like spatial formation.
Developed during the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland and later presented at Nuit Blanche Toronto in 2024, Untitled (Clock – Piece) reflects on humanity’s shifting relationship to labor, progress, and ecological fragility. Through a meditative, cyclical structure, it invites audiences into a space where time becomes tangible—slowed, embodied, and felt.
At the heart of the work is a 10x10 radius of soil—a grounding surface that evokes both origin and eventual return. Surrounding it are 60 stones, carefully arranged in the form of a clock. This simple schema renders time into a visible, spatial form—measured not by machines, but by material weight and repetition. Nearby, a fluorescent factory light flickers with erratic decay. A microphone captures and amplifies the electric sputter of its failing circuitry, creating a raw and unstable soundscape—a mechanical echo of obsolescence and collapse.
Created by: Susannah Haight
a'tugwewinu'g: a night of Mi'kmaw stories
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00pm
Location: The Halifax Commons, Ball Diamond #3 (Robie Street & Cunard Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Descrption: In a wi'koum, lit from within against the dark autumn sky, a dozen storytellers, artists, writers and musicians gather, taking turns throughout the night telling stories, talking about storytelling, offering songs, sharing laughs, finding common ground with all who enter the wi'koum to listen.
a'tugwewinu'g: a night of Mi'kmaq stories features a dozen writers, storytellers, artists, and musicians who gather through the night to tell stories, talk about storytelling, offer songs, and share laughs. This project grew out of a desire to bring L'nu artists together in conversation with each other about the age-old oral tradition of Mi'kma'ki. You're invited into the wi'koum to listen to what arises through the night.
Created by Theresa Meuse, Raymond Sewell & AfterWords Literary Festival
Moxy's Lion
Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Time: 6:00pm - 12:00am
Location: Moxy Hotel (5417 Cogswell Street)
Accessibility: Not wheelchair accessible
Description: Moxy's Lion is custom built & represents the Lion Featured in our Nova Scotia Flag.
The custom-made lion sculpture at Moxy Hotel Halifax is a captivating fusion of art and local culture, designed to embody the spirit of Halifax while adding a bold statement to the hotel’s aesthetic. Crafted by a local artist, the lion is not just a piece of decor but a symbolic representation of strength, courage, and the vibrant community that the hotel serves.
The lion serves as both an art installation and a conversation piece, inviting guests to engage with the cultural and artistic fabric of Halifax from the moment they step into the hotel. It stands as a reminder of the city’s past while looking forward to its future, aligning with Moxy’s brand ethos of delivering an experience that is both stylish and meaningful. This custom-made lion is more than just art; it is a symbol of the pride and strength that defines Halifax.
Created by: Moxy Owners & Simon Lacey
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Propeller Brewing Presents: The Dream Zone
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 12:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Propeller Brewing Company (2015 Gottingen Street)
Accessibility: Semi-accessible (rough terrain)
Description: A decorative and interactive installation on the Propeller patio that brings the illustrated psychedelic dreamzone featured on Propeller’s Nocturne Gin Smash can to life. Come by and listen to music, enjoy a drink, and take some photos in the reactive mutated Earth that spawns the creatures and landscapes we deserve...
Created by: Alex MacAskill
