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/
