Nave is an immersive multimedia installation by Camille Turner that explores the entanglement of colonial Canada in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans through links between the nave of a church, the hold of the ship, the tomb, and the womb of the world. In Nave, a time traveller from the future Age of Awakening – performed by Camille Turner – visits a church in the Age of Silence, circa 2021, to perform a ritual connecting with ancestors of the past. An ancestor – performed by Emilie Jabouin – emerges from the sea and stands on the coast, dedicating a song and dance of resistance and victory. Nave situates the viewer within the context of memory embodied by the ocean. This work draws on strategies from Turner’s ongoing Afronautic Research Lab project. Turner was the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art for the video installation Nave.

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research to explore race, space, home and belonging. 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 for her video installation Nave.