Camal Pribhai and Camille Turner’s Bell from Every. Now. Then at the AGO

An excerpt from an article by Vidal Wu in  Canadian Art.

The AGO’s “Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood” has won a lot of buzz. And for good reason: this show is diverse, challenging and genuinely surprising

Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai, Bell (Wanted Series), 2016. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artists. © Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai. Photo: Christina Sideris.

Consider Bell from Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner’s Wanted series—an immense conceptual photograph that has everything and nothing to do with Canada at the same time. Wanted takes newspaper ads placed by Canadian slave owners claiming their runaway slaves and recreates them as beguiling, defiant photographs. These images run against Canada’s self-serving narrative as deeply uncool, endlessly apologetic and cripplingly passive-aggressive.

Bell is none of those things, drawing on Toronto’s long history of posing as New York in its after-five campiness; at the same time, it bears an indexical relation to missing and murdered Indigenous women who, like those fugitive slaves, simply disappeared.

“Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood”—in which Bell appears—is on now at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And the show is, thankfully, uninterested in being a Colonialism 101 for old arts patrons. Instead, it concerns itself with more than justifying the humanity of Black and Indigenous people.

Curated by Andrew Hunter, Anique Jordan and Quill Christie-Peters, the exhibition is an impressive survey of works that are diverse, challenging and genuinely surprising. After a summer of ambivalence and resistance regarding the sesquicentennial, the experience of seeing familiar artists and activists from Toronto’s social justice community and Canada’s contemporary art scene feels urgent and relevant.