Otherworld

Otherworld is the first major solo museum exhibition by Camille Turner in Toronto. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and currently living and working between Los Angeles and Costa Rica, Turner is widely recognized for her transformative examination of Black history in the Canadian national narrative.

Working in performance, photography, installation, digital and sonic media, often in collaboration with others, Turner’s immersive exhibition continues her long-standing and wide-ranging exploration of Canada’s entanglement in the histories of the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans.

The newly commissioned exhibition, Otherworld, immerses the visitor in a non-linear Afro-Astronautic journey transcending space-time boundaries. Recognizing historical silences as both information and direction, Turner’s Afronautic research methodology takes the visitor deep into the archive, uncovering the traces and legacies of enslavement that extend from named enclaves of urban wealth in Toronto to the shipbuilding industry in Newfoundland. Filled with personal recollections and stories of immeasurable loss, the exhibition walks us back to the portals of departure and arrival of those forcibly taken from the shores of West Africa and dispersed throughout the Americas, and those lost in the passage between. Camille Turner’s work takes its inspiration from Afrofuturism; looping in and around time, it offers places of recovery and dreams of a liberated future. On their journey, the visitor is invited to listen to stories contained in the geologic time of displaced rocks and sea-worn sticks resembling bones, finding there the potential of changing history and, powered by the imagination, to make worlds otherwise.