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