Afronautic Research Lab
October 1, 2024
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts Visual Art Gallery
Brock University presents Camille Turner solo exhibition at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts Visual Art Gallery. The Afronautic Research Lab is a social practice project through which visitors encounter suppressed archival documents providing evidence of colonial Canada’s links to and participation in the transatlantic trade in African people, its ongoing legacies of anti-Blackness and Black resistance.
Project Events
Exhibition at Visual Arts Gallery Oct 1 - 26
Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct 3, 6 pm - 8 pm
Artists Talk: Thursday Oct 3, Warehouse, 4:30 pm - 6 pm
Afronautic Research Methodology workshop, Thursday Oct 5, Visual Arts Gallery, 1 pm - 2:30 pm
Otherworld
September 4, 2024
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
Otherworld is an exhibition that grapples with a silenced past through artworks by Camille Turner and collaborators. This exhibition is produced through an Afronautic methodology created by Turner. Afronautics focuses on journeys by water and space, bringing Afrofuturism, critical fabulation and Black radical imagination together to provide an embodied approach to addressing historical gaps, absences, fissures, and silences. Blackness is centred by locating and amplifying Black voices and time does not operate sequentially, It is nonlinear. What has been silenced makes itself known through haunting. Participants are invited to sit with this haunting presence, to grieve, to contemplate the ongoing legacies of this past and to dream new futures into being.
This photograph is a still from Maria, a video installation presenting a meditation on lives torn apart by the Transatlantic trade in Black flesh. The installation takes its name from The Maria, a 50-ton schooner that was built in Newfoundland in 1785. When the Maria embarked on a slaving voyage in 1790 most of the 80 prisoners it carried were children. In the video hands of four generations reach across time towards each other. Young, old, large, and small — hands of children, parents, and grandparents. The soundtrack employs readings of the testimonies of three historical figures who were abducted from their parents when they were children: Olaudah Equiano. Mary Prince, and Sophia Burthen Pooley.
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto Art Centre
(in University College)
15 King’s College Circle
Wednesday, September 4, 6pm–8pm
University of Toronto Art Centre
Saturday, September 7, 2pm–4pm
University of Toronto Art Centre
Learn more: https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/otherworld/
We See Far
June 21st, 2024
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, Online in SecondLife
We See Far is a virtual exhibition of works by four artists, Camille Turner, Solomon Enos, Ekow Nimako and Skawennati, who have for decades been envisioning futures in which our peoples thrive.
The moment an artist sets out to depict the future, they must interrogate the past. What is our creation story? What are our accomplishments? How did we think, talk, live in earlier times? How do we want to think, talk and live in the future? Historical research is a foundational element of each of these artists’ practices, as is science-fiction. Mixing these two frameworks is the basis of the both Afro Futurism and Indigenous Futurism
National Biennial of Contemporary Sculpture
June 20 to September 13, 2024
Parc Art Gallery, Trois Rivieres, QB
Camille is an invited artist in the 11th BNSC in Trois Rivieres. Afronautic Research Lab responds to the biennale's 2024 theme Oui Dire, which questions the way in which hearsay, through its possibilities of translation and transmission, can prove to be a means of embodying new forms of learning, outside the habits of knowledge transmission imposed by the institutions of power resulting from modernism and the whiffs of imperialism. Can hearsay serve the argument, the understanding of situations rather than hindering a certain critical thinking? How is this model of transmission – from word of mouth – likely to influence the operating models of our societies and lead us to think about the situation differently? Is this not a tool to invoke new futures?
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.
