House of Bâby at Union Station
December 25, 2022
House of Bâby, created collaboratively by Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner, is a 35’ lenticular image on view in Union Station’s majestic Great Hall. The image commemorates eighteen of the Black and Indigenous people who were claimed as property by the prominent Bâby family of Toronto, Windsor and Detroit. In this image they are brought to life, no longer constrained by the past as property nor languishing in the obscurity of the archive. As the viewer moves, the group, represented as contemporary travellers, emerges from the blur of the crowd.
Camille Turner’s Solo Exhibition - Nave
December 25, 2022
November 18th to January 18th
Central Art Garage,
66 B Lebreton St. N, Ottawa, ON
Central Art Garage presents a solo exhibition of the work of Camille Turner featuring the prize winning 3-channel video installation, Nave. This immersive multimedia installation explores the entanglement of colonial Canada in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans. In Nave a time traveller from the Age of Awakening – performed by Camille Turner – visits a church in the Age of Silence, circa 2021, to perform a ritual connecting with ancestors of the past. An ancestor – performed by Emilie Jabouin – emerges from the sea and stands on the coast, dedicating a song and dance of resistance and victory. Nave situates the viewer within the context of memory embodied by the ocean. Turner was the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art.
For more information
https://www.centralartgarage.com/exhibitions/camille-turner-nave
Camille Turner, Nave (2022)
December 25, 2022
Camille Turner, Nave, 2022.
Photo : Courtesy the artist
For this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art, artist Camille Turner collaborated with writer Yaniya Lee to create an internal brief that provides context to the ways in which various Black histories in Toronto have been purposefully buried and erased. In addition to this important work, her commission for the show built upon her dissertation research into Canada’s own entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade. For many, Canada has historically been seen as the bastion of freedom, the final stop on the Underground Railroad, but Turner has been working to uncover the more insidious side of Canada’s involvement. During the 18th century, builders deforested a large swath of Newfoundland, and in the process built at least 19 ships that would ultimately depart to Africa and carry enslaved people back across the Atlantic. In order to reach Africa, these slave ships had to be loaded up with stones from Newfoundland to serve as ballast to ensure that the ships could make the first journey. Those stones would then be abandoned in Africa. In a moving three-channel video, Turner envisions this journey, starting from a Newfoundland church that would have been built with the same timber as those ships. It’s a moving, poetic, and ultimately haunting film that forces viewers to reckon with this past and how so many histories like this remain to be uncovered. —Maximilíano Durón
ARTnews: artists whose work defined 2022
December 25, 2022
In ARTnews Camille Turner was listed as one of 30 artists whose work defined 2022!
Toronto Biennial of Art Artist Prize
December 25, 2022
Camille Turner, who won the Artist Prize for the Toronto Biennial in 2022, is featured in Art Canada Institute along with other prize winning artists.
