Camille Turner

Afronautic Research Lab, Family Matters, HUSH HARBOUR, The Resistance of Peggy Pompadour, TimeWarp, and Miss Canadiana are undoubtedly among Camille Turner’s major works. Falling within the tide and aesthetic of Afrofuturism, Turner’s artistic strategy, in both her performances and installations, oscillates between speculative fiction, non-Western cosmologies, mythology, science fiction, technology, and history and opens a field of myriad possibilities. This stance allows her to challenge the grand narratives of Canadian history. The origins of Turner’s work can be traced to a reflection on Canadian identity, slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and the roots of anti-Black racism in Canada. Exploring the notions of race, space, and belonging, like a griot or storyteller, she reconstructs Black history in the country. Indeed,Afronautic Research Labmelds performance art with social practice to highlight archival evidence and documentaries, revealing significant chapters dissimulated from the country’s history. Like the Black Lives Matter movement, Turner’s work is based on an expansion of the imaginary and our capacity to envisage new worlds. In these truly dystopian times, the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the precarious living conditions of racialized groups has exposed the disproportionate risk of infection and premature death facing Afrodiasporic peoples. In parallel, global revolts against police brutality and the destruction of monuments memo-rializing the history of slavery challenge the blatant disre-gard for the lives of Black people, who embody what Saidiya V. Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.” Evidently, a new order needs to be conceptualized. The imagination of artists has always played a crucial role in urging us toward a utopian existence. And this is where Turner’s artistic force resides, contesting the status quo and provoking critical reflection on history, slavery, the afterlife of slavery, the past, the present, and the future. Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab Newfoundland, captures vidéos | video stills, 2019. Photos : Brian Ricks, permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab Newfoundland, capture vidéo | video still, 2019 Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab (University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada), installation & performance, 2016 Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab (OCAD University, Toronto, Canada), détail de l’installation | installation detail, 2017 Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab (University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada), installation & performance, 2018. Photos : Brian Ricks, Sandra Brewster, Alvin Luong & David James Hudson, permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Camal Pirbhai & Camille Turner Family Matters, capture vidéo, 2017. Photo : courtesy of the artist Camille Turner, Dominique Fontaine

Camille Turner

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