Five of the best bets to check out at Nuit Blanche

1. International Dumpling Festival Ken Lum’s piece, a fully functional array of multiethnic food stands, brings together more or less everything Nuit Blanche wants to achieve this year. By putting on view an array of the city’s diversity, Lum serves up a much-lauded element of our precious civic identity — and brand. At the same time, he exposes it for the latter, as downtown’s longtime immigrant enclaves rapidly give way to condo development. It makes the temporary nature of the installation all the more apt, with the bonus of a vast culinary improvement on the street meat found elsewhere. (James St. & Queen St. W., just west of the Eaton Centre) 2. Transmutations Just to the north, the old, orphaned Church of the Holy Trinity has been the site of many urban transformations, its imprisonment by callous planning only being the last. In its 160 years, it has hosted newcomers from all over the world, including many from the nearby St. John’s Ward, the city’s original immigrant reception area, which now sits under an acre of concrete slab at Nathan Phillips Square. The UK-based duo Dubmorphology will set the tone for a resurrection, with a 12-hour shifting montage of images from the neighbourhood’s past, while performers such as Afua Cooper and the Hamilton Youth Poets bring things right up to the present, urgent moment. (Church of the Holy Trinity, 19 Trinity Square) 3. On Flashing Lights The city’s violent police raids on gay bathhouses in the 1970s is behind Brendan Fernandes’s light and sound and installation, in which police cars will barricade a stage on Bay St. as club music booms. The uneasy space, between bacchanal and emergency, looks squarely at the remaining rift between condemnation and acceptance for a community used to living on the margins — and how recent a phenomenon the sunny narrative of inclusion really is. (Bay St. & Richmond St.) 4. our roots are here, amongst the grasses: being who you are there is no other, 2017. collective gestures, 2018. Jessica Karahunga’s video piece being who you are there is no other is a haunting meditation on the idea of hereness: Two young Black women, one of them the artist, move gracefully through a distinctly Ontarian landscape, the likes of which any number of generations of landscape painters would have happily lionized. Installed in Scarborough, the piece, and others, will function as the staking of a claim for an emerging cohort, the children of immigrants, looking to make this place their own, and on their own terms. (Frank Faubert Woodlot East Trail, Ellesmere Rd. & McCowan Ave.) 5. Built for Art 401 Richmond’s annual opendoors embrace of this event, and so many others, is extraspecial this year. After a yearlong battle with the city over property tax that would have cratered this critically important hub of cultural activity, there’s a very specific reason to celebrate. Given the sky-high property market’s dark horizon for most kinds of artistic activity, 401, I fear, is destined to become an island in a city core rapidly becoming an enclave of high-priced homogeneity. (401 Richmond St. at Spadina Ave.)