Goblin Market

Goblin Market is a public programming series that brings together six Nova Scotian media artists with UKAI Projects (Toronto) to collaboratively create an immersive marketplace installation to reimagine artistic exchange. The project unfolds in three phases: a three-month collaborative development period, two evening public presentations of live performances and participatory exchanges, and a week-long exhibition of the installation.

The public presentation transforms CFAT into Goblin Market, a space where artists role-play as travelling merchants over two consecutive evenings. Instead of exchanging money, audiences might trade a song, a digital file, a story, or a small object for encounters with artists and their work. These micro-exchanges test alternative models of artistic economy rooted in curiosity, care, and shared presence. Artists can also sell artworks or editions, creating a hybrid economy that acknowledges professional compensation while exploring new forms of value exchange. Following the performance nights, the installation remains open as a public exhibition for one week, allowing broader neighbourhood access and extending the project's reach.

This project addresses urgent questions for media artists specifically. How do you value something that can be infinitely copied? How do artists build sustainable practices when funding keeps shrinking and commercial models keep collapsing? Are artist-run centres currently built to foster genuine care or are we operating from scarcity mindsets? These aren't abstract questions for us, they're practical challenges our artists face daily. This makes CFAT's membership uniquely positioned to engage with Goblin Market's playful interrogation of artistic value and exchange.

Goblin Market proposes that artists and publics can collaboratively imagine and test different ways of being together, different forms of value, different relationships to creative labour. This isn't utopian fantasy but practical experimentation grounded in the real conditions and creative strategies Nova Scotia artists have already developed. Let's find out what happens when we trade songs for stories, when value gets measured in curiosity instead of dollars, and when CFAT is overrun by goblin merchants!