Nocturne Artist Talk – Peter Morin & Leah Decter

Name: Nocturne Artist Talk – Peter Morin & Leah Decter
Start: 2025-10-16T19:00:00-03:00
End: 2025-10-16T20:30:00-03:00
Location: 1723 Hollis Street, Halifax, NS, Canada, Nova Scotia B3J 1V9

Schedule

Thu Oct 16 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:30 pm

UTC-03:00

Location

1723 Hollis Street, Halifax, NS, Canada, Nova Scotia B3J 1V9 | Halifax, NS

Join Nocturne for a conversation between artists and collaborators Peter Morin (Tahltan, French Canadian) and Leah Decter (Canadian Jewish white-settler) as they reflect on their collaborative project, X: where our paths cross.
Admission is free from 5-9pm during BMO Free Access Thursday, however registration is encouraged as there are limited seats available.

About X: where our paths cross
X: where our paths cross is a performance of visiting, trust and otherwise possibilities. In it, Peter Morin (Tahltan, French Canadian) and Leah Decter (Canadian Jewish white-settler) mark the crossing of paths across time, territories and ancestries through reading aloud as an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and listening-while-drawing as a practice of white-setter accountability.
Experience X: where our paths cross live on Saturday, October 18 from 6pm-midnight for Nocturne: Ground at the Halifax Central Library.

About the Artists
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and performance art as a research methodology. Morin completed his BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2001 and his MFA in 2010 at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Morin’s artistic practice moves from printmaking to poetry to installation to performance art. Morin’s first performance ‘I grieve too much’ took place at the Museum of Anthropology in 2005. Peter is the son of Janelle Morin (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (Quebecois). Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation, and prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations. Morin was longlisted for the Brink and Sobey Awards, in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin is an member of artist collectives : BUSHgallery and O’kinādās. Peter Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and is the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.
Leah Decter is a Canadian inter-media/performance artist and scholar who divides her time between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she is a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies and Assistant Professor in Media Arts at NSCAD University. Holding an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, Decter creates work that straddles performance, video and media arts, textiles, social practice and installation as well as academic and creative writing. Working from a critical white settler perspective her solo and collaborative artwork and research uncover and disturb social, political, relational and spatial dynamics of settler colonial whiteness in the everyday through practices of intergenerational accountability and non-colonial activation. Her artwork often calls into question dominant beliefs about, and attachments to, Canadian icons, myths and visual/material culture. She has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork and research, and has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Malta and India. Decter’s artwork has appeared in publications including Fuse Magazine, Studio, Craft and Design in Canada, C Magazine, Journal of Canadian Art History and Border Crossings. Her recent published writing includes texts in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters, chapters in Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities, and, with Carla Taunton, Unsettling Canadian Art History and Settler Responsibilities Towards Decolonisation as well as a special issue of PUBLIC Journal co-edited with Taunton titled “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures.”