The light fantastic Nuit Blanche ready to wow in city’s core By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 6:33 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 25, 2026

For one night each September, downtown Winnipeg becomes an art gallery — an amusement park, even.

During Nuit Blanche, which takes place tonight, 3D projections spill across the Exchange District, The Forks and St. Boniface, and thousands flood the city core to take in live music, DJs and installations.

“There really isn’t anything like it. I know every promoter probably tells you that, but we are the only event that works at this scale in the fall,” says Nuit Blanche general manager Kurt Tittlemier.

“Culture Days Manitoba is run with the mission statement to make free, accessible artistic programming to all,” he adds, referring to the multi-week national festival, “and Nuit Blanche is our flagship event.”

There will be the usual late-night dance parties, with their haze of pot smoke catching the lights from a menagerie of glowing gizmos, scattered across the Exchange.

For the growing numbers of young people after more of an EDM festival experience, Old Market Square and Lily Street in the Exchange District are the place to boogie beginning around 10 p.m., after families go home.

Free shuttles — including city buses branded “Nuit Blanche Winnipeg” across downtown, the Exchange and St. Boniface, and water buses from 9 p.m. to midnight with four stops across The Forks, St. Boniface Cathedral, Stephen Juba Park and Hugo Docks — facilitate traffic back and forth.

This year’s Nuit Blanche also features about 90 free registered events across downtown, in keeping with the Paris-born festival’s more avant-garde origins: infusing public spaces with contemporary art. Most run from about 6 p.m. to midnight and are family friendly; Nuit Blanche’s website has more details about event and transit schedules.

Highlights include Ancient Future, alongside the riverside path of Stephen Juba Park. It uses electric signals from a tree to create ambient sounds with a live performance by óFukami (Leaf Rapids’ Keri Latimer) at the top of every hour featuring live theremin, giving the whole thing a certain extraterrestrial air. If that doesn’t grab you, maybe the life-size figures gathered around the park’s glowing 12-by-12-metre monolith will.

As usual, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights — a hop, skip and a jump from the breakdancing and hip hop-centric Kultivation events at The Forks — serves as another hub. Developed in connection with its new At the Knees of Our Ancestors exhibit, the museum’s entertainment is curated by Trinnipeg, while installations including Anna Binta Diallo’s Currents and Diallo’s Shapeshifter cast shifting colours and imagery across the museum’s jagged architecture.

For a more traditional fine art experience, check out the pop-up at the Bend for photography, sculpture, painting and fibre arts, or the Herd and Hive show featuring Riel Gentlemen’s Choir and Ruah Dance Collective, which will fill the Exchange District’s Elgin Avenue alleyway with choir and dance before migrating for performances elsewhere, emulating the bison that inspires the work.

Among other headlining events in the Exchange is Bîstyek’s IMABOX at Old Market Square — which features inflatable characters, some as tall as four metres— on Kurdish identity and displacement.

Though he doesn’t like to pick favourites, it’s clear Tittlemier is especially excited for The Wolf and the Lamb (Le loup et l’agneau), which will turn St. Boniface Cathedral’s facade, an open-air stone ruin, into a stage for a modernized, 3D-projected telling of the Aesop/Jean de La Fontaine fable.

It’s easy to see why. He says the project emerged after a representative of the French embassy attended Winnipeg’s Nuit Blanche, “loved it, ” and contacted his office the next day about a collaboration.

“It was a huge vote of confidence to our team because he’s been involved in Nuit Blanches in France and he knows what a Nuit Blanche is,” Tittlemier says.

The resulting bilingual collaboration among Winnipeg artists Julie Gendron and Emma Hendrix (Manufacturing Entertainment) and French artist Jules-Camille Huvig. The original fable is about a hungry wolf who accuses an innocent lamb of all sorts of preposterous misdemeanours to justify eating him.

Through large-scale projects — rich with hard-to-miss Easter eggs involving “Wolf News” — the artists spin a retelling of the fable that riffs on contemporary politics.

“Ultimately, the whole thing is a satire that questions dynamics between non-democratic leaders versus community, and the push and pull between that,” Gendron says.

“It becomes a piece of the architecture, and I think that just really, it surprises people,” adds Hendrix.

While Nuit Blanche happens just one night of the year, the artists hope Winnipeg’s creative community will carry on the excitement that comes with experimenting with 3D-mapping and other more cutting-edge visual art techniques.

“There is a can-do attitude here. There is a great art scene and it’s huge, but there’s a shyness (about technology). I’m always just encouraging people to play with these things, not give up on the stories (they) tell in other ways,” says Gendron.

“AI is definitely something to worry about, but I think that people will look out and want authentic work from artists in the future.”

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com