Camille Turner in What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic at The Rooms

Excerpts from 2 articles in Canadian Art: What to See in 2020: The Atlantic and the North by Amanda Shore, and What Carries Us by Kate Lahey

On a local scale, “What Carries Us: Newfoundland & Labrador in the Black Atlantic,” curated by Bushra Junaid and featuring works by Sonia Boyce, Sandra Brewster, Shelley Miller and Camille Turner, explores the province’s role in the international trade system that moved enslaved people and goods across continents.

Installation view (detail) of “What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic,” The Rooms, 2019.

“What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic” unearthed stories from Newfoundland and Labrador’s Afro-diasporic histories, including the province’s commercial involvement in slavery through boat building and the trade of fish, sugar, molasses and rum. Didactic and dialectic, the exhibition traced relationships between cultural memory and archival silence through works by Canadian artists Sandra Brewster, Shelley Miller and Camille Turner, and British artist Sonia Boyce, alongside artifacts and objects from Newfoundland and Labrador.

These objects, bereft of historical detail and thereby haunted by a cryptic silence, became activated when contextualized by recent works such as Turner’s Afrofuturist video installation Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (2019), which engaged with historical research through a contemporary performance practice.