Project T-Dot

Recording Artist, Producer, Actor, Entrepreneur: Aubrey Drake Graham Professionally Known As Drake, Location: Sound Academy, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2009, Photographer: Ajani Charles

Project Summary

Project T-Dot is a long-term documentary, archival, and public scholarship initiative dedicated to documenting, preserving, and interpreting the hip-hop culture, community, and history of the Greater Toronto Area.

The project was founded in December 2006 by Ajani Charles, who began documenting Toronto’s hip-hop ecosystem as an undergraduate after recognizing a structural absence: despite the city’s growing global influence and deep roots in Black diasporic life, Toronto’s hip-hop culture had never been systematically documented as a coherent historical and cultural system.

Existing representations were largely fragmented, promotional, or retrospective, rather than sustained, community-embedded, and historically accountable.

The project’s title draws from ‘T-Dot,’ a slang term for Toronto that emerged in the early 2000s within local hip-hop culture, reflecting the city’s growing assertion of its own linguistic, cultural, and geographic identity.

At its core, Project T-Dot is built around black-and-white documentary photography, complemented by long-form interviews, filmmaking, and writing.

Black and white was chosen as a deliberate epistemological strategy and an aesthetic preference.

Production Manager, First Assistant Director: John Adams Also Known As Bronski, Director of Artist Marketing: Carey Riley, Music Industry Consultant, Artist Manager, Producer, Entrepreneur: David Cox Also Known As Click, Location: *Bastid’s BBQ*, The Bentway, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2024, Photographer: Ajani Charles

By removing the distractions of colour, the work foregrounds presence, labour, and relationality, while evoking historical continuity and resisting spectacle.

Methodologically, the project is distinguished by longitudinal, embedded documentation rather than retrospective compilation.

Over nearly two decades, Ajani Charles has integrated himself within the Greater Toronto Area’s hip-hop ecosystem in a manner that has produced levels of access unavailable to conventional researchers or archival initiatives, allowing him to return repeatedly to the same individuals, spaces, and organizations while continuously documenting new ones.

This sustained presence has enabled the project to capture trust-based, intergenerational narratives that are rarely available to short-term researchers, journalists, or institutions.

The archive remains intentionally partial and iterative, prioritizing accountability and dialogue over claims of total authority.

Community responsibility and consultation guide all aspects of the work.

Dancer, Choreographer: Corrie Daniel Professionally Known As Benzo, Location: Andy Pool Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2008, Photographer: Ajani Charles

Project T-Dot has been produced independently and continuously for nearly twenty years, completely without institutional support for its first fifteen years of production.

Its development required significant personal sacrifice, uncompensated labour, and opportunity costs across Ajani Charles’ commercial career, and the long-term assumption of creative, logistical, and demonstrative responsibilities typically distributed across institutions rather than individuals.

The project’s continuity reflects a deliberate commitment to historical stewardship over short-term visibility or commercial return.

In recent years, Project T-Dot has expanded into large-scale public scholarship, including museum-grade exhibitions installed in major civic and infrastructural spaces such as Toronto City Hall & Nathan Phillips Square (2022) and Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (2024 – 2025).

These free, bilingual exhibitions functioned as living public archives, reaching millions of viewers outside traditional academic and museum settings.

The Billy Bishop exhibition introduced the first publicly accessible digital database dedicated to a major city’s hip-hop culture in a physical space like the airport, allowing visitors to engage directly with biographical, visual, and audiovisual materials through an interactive touchscreen interface via a 55-inch touchscreen.

DJ, Entrepreneur, Model, Event Planner: Kelsey Williams Professionally Known As Killa Kels, Location: Free Play, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2023, Photographer: Ajani Charles

Future outputs include additional exhibits, a multi-part documentary film series, a comprehensive book-length publication via a coffee table book, expanded digital archives, and educational initiatives and youth mentorship stewarded through The Project T-Dot Foundation, a non-profit institution co-founded by Ajani Charles, Neil “Logik” Donaldson, Laura Metcalfe, and Matthew Romeo in November 2025, and established to ensure long-term governance, preservation, and intergenerational transmission beyond any single individual.

The Foundation operates with a formal trustee partnership with The Remix Project, one of Toronto’s most influential hip-hop–rooted cultural institutions, widely recognized for its role as a charitable organization focused on youth mentorship and developing generations of artists, entrepreneurs, and cultural workers emerging from the city’s hip-hop ecosystem.

This governance structure was established to ensure long-term stewardship, institutional accountability, and intergenerational transmission of the work beyond any single individual.

Project T-Dot offers a rare, durational case study of how hip-hop history can be written with communities rather than extracted from them, combining methodological rigour, ethical responsibility, and public accessibility at the scale of cultural infrastructure.

Graffiti By SKAM, Graffiti Alley, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2023, Photographer: Ajani Charles

Project T-Dot at Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square

Exhibit: *Project T-Dot*, Location: Toronto City Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2022, Photographer: Ajani Charles

In April 2022, Project T-Dot entered the public realm for the first time through a solo outdoor photography exhibition by Ajani Charles, presented through ArtworxTO, the City of Toronto’s public art division at the time.

Installed on April 19, 2022, the exhibition occupied the exterior of Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square, marking Ajani Charles’ first public art exhibit and a major transition point for Project T-Dot from long-form documentary research into large-scale public scholarship.

The exhibition was fully accessible to the public, free of charge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and featured 39 large-scale perforated vinyl photographic works installed directly on City Hall’s windows, along with two monumental banners, one mounted on City Hall and the other at the southwest entrance to Nathan Phillips Square.

The project was supported by Manifesto Community Projects and Canon Canada, and was presented as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021 – 2022, a city-wide initiative celebrating Toronto’s public art ecosystem and creative communities.

Originally scheduled to conclude on July 19, 2022, the exhibition was extended until September 6, 2022, following a majority vote by Toronto City Councillors, a rare outcome for a temporary public art installation. The extension reflected the project’s scale of public engagement and cultural impact.

According to Joe Sellors, former Project Lead for ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art and one of the exhibition’s producers, the exhibition generated millions of physical impressions, with numerous residents and visitors encountering the work through daily civic circulation.

For many, the exhibition served as their first introduction to Project T-Dot and to Toronto’s hip-hop culture, community, and history as a coherent cultural narrative.

In addition to extensive coverage across Canada’s major media platforms, Ajani Charles was invited to deliver a keynote presentation at Artscape Daniels Launchpad on Project T-Dot and the City Hall exhibition as part of the sixteenth annual Manifesto Festival.

The installation remains, at a physical level, the largest art exhibit focused on Canadian hip-hop culture in history, and the first exhibition ever to occupy two full floors of the exterior of Toronto City Hall, establishing a precedent for how hip-hop history can be presented as civic-scale public memory.

Former Mayor: John Tory, Location: Toronto City Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2022, Photographer: Ajani Charles

Project T-Dot at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

Exhibit: *Project T-Dot*, Location: Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Year: 2024, Photographer: Ajani Charles

On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, and following a multi-part installation process, Ajani Charles debuted his second solo Project T-Dot exhibition at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, presented by Nieuport Aviation and proudly sponsored by Sony Music Entertainment Canada.

Building on the momentum of his first public art exhibition at Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square (2022), this installation extended Project T-Dot’s long-term documentary work into a high-traffic civic gateway, positioning Toronto’s hip-hop history as public memory rather than subcultural footnote.

Initially part of the CONTACT Photography Festival’s 2024 programming, with additional support from Toronto Port Authority (formerly PortsToronto), Canon Canada, and the City of Toronto, the exhibition was installed in the terminal atrium beyond the airport’s underground tunnel.

It was fully public, bilingual (English and French), and free to access, requiring no airline ticket or entry fee, and was open daily from 5:00 AM to 11:59 PM (EST).

It remains the largest art installation ever presented at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, and, at the time of its run, the largest Canadian hip-hop–focused public exhibition in Canada.

Originally scheduled to close on January 22, 2025, the exhibition’s public reception prompted an unprecedented series of extensions and expansions.

It was extended three times, continuing through to November 30, 2025, and was expanded in scope, including the unveiling of a fourth wall installation on June 17, 2025.

In the context of Toronto public exhibitions, and especially exhibitions centred on hip-hop culture, this level of extension and physical expansion is exceptionally rare, signalling sustained demand rather than a one-time cultural moment.

The installation featured over 100 members of Toronto’s hip-hop ecosystem and affiliated organizations, presented through 75 large-scale black-and-white vinyl photographic works, interpretive panels, and a 55-inch interactive touchscreen.

The touchscreen housed the first and largest publicly accessible digital database in a physical space like Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, dedicated to a city’s hip-hop community, updated throughout the exhibition’s run and designed to function as a living, on-site public archive.

The exhibit’s database was updated monthly.

According to Nieuport Aviation, the exhibit experienced approximately 4 million physical impressions based on the airport’s foot traffic alone.

The exhibit intentionally spanned multiple generations and roles across the Greater Toronto Area’s hip-hop ecosystem, much like Project T-Dot at Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square: artists, DJs, cultural workers, institutions, and community infrastructures, bringing together widely recognized figures and under-documented contributors within a single interpretive frame.

In doing so, it demonstrated that Toronto hip-hop is not only a music scene, but a durable civic and diasporic cultural system consisting of many mediums and roles.

Beyond the physical installation, the project extended into mass public circulation through a major digital campaign produced in collaboration with PATTISON Outdoor Advertising during the summer of 2024, featuring a short cut of one of four short films directed and produced by Ajani Charles on behalf of Project T-Dot at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.

The campaign streamed at hundreds of locations across the Greater Toronto Area, including public transit stations and other prominent public and commercial sites, generating extraordinary public visibility for an art exhibition, over 100 million in-person digital screen impressions, and reinforcing Project T-Dot’s central claim: that hip-hop history belongs in the city’s daily infrastructure, not only in galleries, private collections, or nostalgia-driven retrospectives.

Together, the Billy Bishop installation and its citywide campaign further established Project T-Dot as a public-facing cultural archive with institutional credibility, demonstrating how long-form documentary research can be translated into accessible civic-scale scholarship, while remaining accountable to the community it documents.

Project Summary

Project T-Dot at Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square

Project T-Dot at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

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