Grenfell Art Gallery presents
An archival presentation by Camille Turner
Afronautic Research Lab
Newfoundland edition
AUGUST 10TH - OCTOBER 19TH
The ocean remembers
Camille Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab invites the public to consider evidence of Newfoundland and colonial Canada’s links to, and participation in, transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. Since starting this project in 2016, she has been traveling across the country gathering local histories. Turner’s Newfoundland Edition meditates on research undertaken in Atlantic Canada, focussing on 19 purpose-built slave ships constructed in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The viewer is guided into this conversation through a video-performance that was developed and created during a residency at 2 Rooms in Duntara, Newfoundland as part of the 2019 Bonavista Biennale. In this key work, now part of the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Turner offers herself as a figure who has returned from the future to piece together the past. She contemplates the land and the trees used to build the slave ships, and listens to the waters of the Black Atlantic for those who were ripped from their homes and transported in the cargo hulls of those very ships. It is her voice we hear as she ponders this history: Waves lapping against these shores witnessed this crime; they hold the memory of the dead whose bodies were thrown overboard…
Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab has served as impetus for an arc of work that proposes an alternative to a future world that is dictated by institutional violence and oppression. One that begins through the collaborative and collective process of unsilencing the past, one issue at a time.
Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections including: National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, The Wedge Collection and The Rooms.