Leala Hewak’s photo series HEADQUARTERS at Bay Station
BYLINE: Bushra Azim Boblai, Arts & Culture Editor
Bay Station’s crumbling infrastructure makes me incredibly desolate. I even complained about the station to Mayor Olivia Chow last summer. For the entire month of May, however, the Line 2 subway station’s upstairs walls were transformed by the display of Leala Hewak’s photo series, HEADQUARTERS, as a core exhibition of the 2026 CONTACT Photography Festival.
Hewak’s model, Don Hewak — who is also her partner — has the perfect midcentury executive’s brow furrow. Don poses as a businessman from a bygone era of office work in a crisp black suit set at the W. C. McBrien Building, the headquarters of the TTC. I was particularly taken by a shot of the businessman next to a paper chart with a drawing of concentric circles with the core labelled “Process of elimination” and “Memory Trigger,” the wording scrawled at the bottom of the page.
Cadence Weapon’s Parallel World and Toronto grievances
BYLINE: Bushra Azim Boblai, Arts & Culture Editor
I’ve only known Cadence Weapon (the pseudonym of Rollie Pemberton) as a writer. I particularly enjoyed his survey of the dire economic state of touring as a musician in Toronto Life. Pemberton launched his second book, Ways of Listening, at Type Books last week. After hearing him speak about the merit of struggle in creating human art, I immediately wanted to give his music a try.
The 10-track album, which won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize, is political, playful, and a poet’s dream. “Africville’s Revenge” is a track referencing the historic Black Nova Scotian community that was razed in the 1960s because of anti-Black urban planning. Pemberton uses the song to envision a revisionist Afrofuturist utopia that restores Africville and other torn down Black Canadian historical communities like Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Alberta’s Amber Valley.
Other standout tracks include “On Me,” a song about the perverse interference of the digital surveillance state, and “Skyline,” which beautifully derides neoliberal former Toronto mayor John Tory’s political decisions that continue to harm the city.
Call the Midwife series finale
BYLINE: Juliet Pieters, Associate Arts & Culture Editor
BBC’s Call the Midwife has been running as a popular drama series since 2012. It now spans 15 seasons and is set between 1957–1971. I recently watched the final season of the series, and it was a tear-jerker. I have always loved this series’ focus on women, especially on the challenges of childbearing and the fight for women’s health issues to be taken seriously in the fast-changing world of the 1960s.
The final season did not stray from this focus. The maternity ward is under threat of closure due to the local council’s decision to fund National Health Service maternity rooms instead. The Poplar neighbourhood’s nurses and medical staff rally to advocate for the community of mothers in London’s East End.
The final episode reduced me to tears in the first five minutes, and kept me a tearful mess for the rest of the hour. The show ends with the acknowledgement that — despite the lifework of the Sisters and nurses of Nonnatus House — women’s healthcare still had a long way to go in 1972. However, the final scenes instill hope in characters and viewers alike through the call for resilience in the face of adversity.
BYLINE: Juliet Pieters, Associate Arts & Culture Editor,
On May 22, UK singer Maisie Peters released her third studio album titled Florescence. The album follows the singer’s healing and journey into adulthood. The album meditates on aging as a woman and growing into happiness when your artistic identity has been tied mostly to heartbreak. I admire this album’s ability to be as vulnerable as reading a diary entry, whether when accompanied by a full band or a sole acoustic guitar.
My favourite tracks on the album were the ballads: “Say My Name In Your Sleep,” “Old Fashioned,” and “Flat Earther.” Peters’ ballads have a unique way of turning sadness into snark.
Season two of Rivals is not afraid of complicated women
BYLINE: Bushra Azim Boblai, Arts & Culture Editor
No one watches the smash-hit raunchy period-drama based on the romance novels by Jilly Cooper for the complicated inner lives and ambitions of women in Thatcher-era England.
In their second season however, the writer’s room really cooked. We have Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack), the typecast voracious blonde who constantly cheats on her MP husband, recently pregnant by the nefarious Lord Baddingham, who is also her employer at Corineum Television.
When Baddingham pressures an abortion and derails her daytime television career, Atack gorgeously portrays a woman with complicated desires struggling with her limited choices.
Sarah’s fear of pregnancy being a death knell to her ambition unfortunately still rings true 40 years on from the ’80s. Sarah remains unapologetic for her lust and does not hide her distaste for the domestic expectations placed on her as a politician’s wife. Watching her chain-smoke her way through the chaos in her life is a great watch. I cannot wait to see how the rest of the second season explores this storyline.
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