Exhibitions by Akin Space Award Recipients Coming to Remote Gallery in October
This October, all three 2025 recipients of the Akin Space Award will be exhibiting their work at Remote Gallery. We can’t wait to see what they’ve been working towards and invite you to visit all three exhibitions between October 16-25.
In partnership with the Neighborhood Arts Network, the Akin Space Award focuses on providing creation, performance, and/or exhibition spaces to newcomer professional artists who are past recipients of the Toronto Arts Foundation Newcomer Arts Award. This award not only provides funding and space essential for professional artists to grow their practice, but also supports artists in growing their professional network. The winners have received $500 cash to support their arts practice and $2,000 in Akin credit to be used for studio or exhibition space.
Read on to learn more about the artists and the exhibitions, mark your calendars and be sure to check them out!
Leila Refahi, LIMINALITY
October 16-17, 2026
Gallery Hours: 12-8 pm
Opening Reception: Fri Oct 16 from 5-8pm
Remote Gallery, Gallery B, 568 Richmond St W
A landscape after rupture exists in suspension between being and non-being—a threshold of renewed possibility, where the memory of time, space, and matter is transformed.
At this threshold, what remains is a question of what it means to inhabit the space between an ending and a beginning, and of what, carrying the trace of absence, becomes present once again.
Liminality is an experimental presentation bringing together painting, moving image, photography, and mixed-media works on canvas.
Leila Refahi (@leilarefahi.art) is a Toronto-based visual artist, researcher, and educator whose practice explores the intersection of nature, mythology, and climate justice. Working across painting, installation, and socially engaged art, she investigates cycles of destruction and renewal, drawing on Iranian cultural narratives and ecological realities to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.
www.leilarefahi.com
Azadeh Pirazimian, Encounter
October 16-18, 2026
Gallery Hours: Oct 17 from 1-9pm and Oct 18 from 11-6pm
Opening Reception: Fri Oct 16 from 6-9pm
Remote Gallery, Gallery A, 568 Richmond St West
Azadeh Pirazimian (@azadeh_pirazimian) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, originally from Gilan province in northern Iran. Working across performance, installation, drawing, sculpture, and poetry, her practice explores the body as a site of embodied knowledge in relation to material, memory, and place, often through tactile, earth-based, and organic materials.
Her work begins with encounters that become impossible to ignore. An image, a material, or a bodily experience activates long-standing questions around bodies, power, memory, and control. Through sculpture, performance, sound, and material processes, she investigates what happens when these encounters enter physical space—how bodies carry histories, experience rupture, and create possibilities for transformation.
She holds a Bachelor of Painting and a Master of Art from Iran, and a Master of Fine Arts from Canada. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has received support and recognition from various institutions and granting bodies, including the Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council, SSHRC, and others.
Melika Saeeda, Here Again and Again
October 22-25, 2026
Gallery Hours: Oct 22, 24 and 26 from 12-6 pm
Opening Reception: Fri Oct 23 from 4-7pm
Remote Gallery, 568 Richmond St West
Here Again and Again explores the emotional spaces women create between one another, through proximity, distance, gestures, and shared experiences. The figures are not idealized; they hold moments of silence, vulnerability, resilience, and connection. “For me, sisterhood is about making space for difference, understanding, and the relationships we build through it.”
Melika Saeeda (@melikasaeeda) was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and graduated with an MFA in Graphic Design from Tehran Art University. Over the past 10 years, she has illustrated more than 30 children’s books in Turkey and Iran. Many of Melika’s illustrations have also appeared in Iranian children’s magazines and books, and her artwork has been exhibited at book fairs in Iran, Canada, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Her art is about telling stories that draw on her experiences as an Iranian artist. She is inspired by traditional Iranian methods of depiction, such as the narratives in Persian miniatures – tiny, ornate paintings that tell traditional stories.
melikasaeeda.com