Camille Turner listed as Artist with Forward-Thinking Practice - Canadian Art
excerpt from January 3, 2017 Canadian Art article by Rea McNamara
Camille Turner (with Ayoka Junaid), Afronautic Research Lab , 2016. Documentation of performance/installation at the A.C. Hunter Public Library Arts and Culture Centre, St. John’s. Photo: Sandra Brewster.
This September, the Afronauts—descendants of West Africa’s Dogon people, who left Earth 10,000 years ago only to return to save the planet—touched down in their brown Pierre Cardin–esque capes at St. John’s A.C. Hunter Library Arts and Culture Centre to set up their Research Lab. As part of Eastern Edge Gallery’s “New-Found-Lands” group show, Camille Turner encouraged locals to sift through 18th-century newspapers featuring classified ads placed by Canadian slave-owners.
The performance and installation is an ongoing project intertwined with Turner’s four-year excavation of Canada’s hidden history of slavery. Previously, she had mined this research for her Miss Canadiana heritage walking tours, and this research has deepened since she started her PhD last fall in York University’s environmental-studies program.
“I often feel like what I am doing is science fiction,” says the Kingston, Jamaica–born, Toronto-based media and performance artist, who was recently highlighted in Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars’s follow-up to their Canadian women in performance art anthology. “You know, to cavort with the ghosts is what I think about, because these things haunt the present, and sci-fi is a great language for connecting with the ghosts.”