Camille Turner, Portals, 2024. Installation (nineteen images printed on fabric). Commissioned by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid for Otherworld at Art Museum.

Portals (2024)

Portals is a series of 19 large scale textile panels hung side-by-side to create a corridor through which visitors navigate. The number of the panels correspond to the number of slave ships constructed in Newfoundland for the transatlantic trade. The panels map a journey through haunted spaces where the ghostly residue of colonial violence still lingers. Sites represented include the Door of No Return on Senegal’s Gorée Island, the most western point of Africa, Cape Spear, the most eastern point of North America, where the military stood guard over St John’s Harbour. The journey continues through the treeless shores of eastern Newfoundland where dense forests had been cut down to make wooden structures including the slave ships built on the island. It travels through the pastel washed architectural landscape of St Louis, Senegal where in a cellar dubbed house of spirits, Black bodies were held and harvested for the transatlantic trade.