A Journey through Otherworld

A multi-sensory program of workshops, tours, and presentations

March 12–15, 2025

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Venues:

University of Toronto Art Centre
15 King’s College Circle

Hart House
7 Hart House Circle

University College
15 King’s College Circle

Guest curated by Bushra Junaid, and supported by Curator of Programs, Drea Asibey, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto presents A Journey through Otherworld, a multi-sensory program of workshops, tours, and presentations inspired by Camille Turner’s exhibition Otherworld, on view at the Art Museum until March 22, 2025.

Utilizing Afrofuturism to reimagine the past, present, and liberated and whole futures, Otherworld explores the silences of Canada’s colonial past with particular focus on Newfoundland and Labrador’s social, economic, and geological entanglements with the Black Atlantic, including its connections to the transatlantic slave trade.

Engage your senses and move, listen, taste, touch, visualize, and imagine through a program of hands-on activities designed to educate, inform, and engage, while building public memory and encouraging healing.

All events are free. Everyone welcome!

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Program Schedule

Afronautic Research Lab: Workshop with Outerregion

Wednesday, March 12, 6pm–8pm
University of Toronto Art Centre

The Afronautic Research Lab (2016–ongoing) is a social practice project that invites visitors to explore suppressed archival documents revealing Canada’s historical involvement in the transatlantic trade of African people. It sheds light on the ongoing legacies of anti-Blackness and Black resistance.

In this workshop facilitated by Outerregion, an experimental performance group founded by Camille and her siblings Karen and Lee Turner, participants will be invited to engage and contend with the archive by being guided through the depths of Canada’s entanglement in the transatlantic slave trade and its continuing impacts today. Drawing from newspaper clippings from the 18th century to the present, “wanted” ads for enslaved people who escaped, and ephemera, the Afronauts will lead visitors through complex and often overlooked histories of anti-Blackness and Black resistance. By the end of the experience, participants will return to the present, navigating the Lab as a space of hope and potential for the future.

Outerregion is an ad hoc social practice/performance collective founded by Camille Turner in collaboration with siblings Karen Turner and Lee Turner. The group was created to engage the public by creating perception altering experiences. These take many forms such as Afronautic Research Lab, a futuristic counter-archive that enables the public to encounter evidence of anti-Blackness and Black resistance stemming back to the enslavement of African people in places that appear, on the surface, to be innocent white spaces.

Marking the Future: Afrofuturism, Storytelling, Printmaking, and Collage Workshop

Thursday, March 13, 11am–1pm
Hart House Reading Room

In collaboration with Hart House’s Get Crafty! and Black Futures, this hands on, drop-in workshop co-led by Queen Kukoyi and Jasmine Vanstone of OddSide Arts, offers a space for us to reclaim and retell our stories through the lens of Afrofuturism. Rooted in themes of Afrofuturism, heritage, and creative expression, the session will explore Akan cosmology and Adinkra symbols as sources of inspiration for storytelling and artistic exploration of liberated futures.

Participants will engage in a hybrid process of collaging and printmaking, blending traditional and contemporary techniques to create works that reflect cultural identity and personal narratives.

No registration required.

Queen Kukoyi (they|she) is a Black, Gender-Queer, Neurodivergent, Mad, Award-Winning Multidisciplinary Multimedia and Creative Technology Artist whose work merges Queer theory, Afrofuturism, and Noetic sciences with art and technology. Their practice spans collage, illustration, spoken word poetry, animations, Augmented Reality, immersive experiences, installations, and intricate pattern designs rooted in Igbo cosmology. These patterns reflect transcendence, balance, and interconnectivity, embodying ancestral wisdom.

For over 20 years, Queen has fought structural violence against Black and Indigenous youth through youth services, arts education, and justice advocacy. As the founding co-lead of Oddside Arts, a grassroots creative tech collective, they bridge art, technology, and wellness through Black speculative design.

Jasmine Vanstone (she/her) is a Jamaican-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and arts facilitator who inspires and amplifies marginalized voices through arts mentorship, community arts programming, and public art. Through her artistic practice, she experiments in various mediums—primarily collage, public art, poetry, and paper crafts—to share visual reflections of identity, wellness, and the natural environment. Her talent, along with the power of mentorship, has earned her awards and features at Nuit Blanche, TOAF, KUUMBA, DesignTO, YZD, Finch Station, and Pearson Airport. Most recently, Jasmine was awarded the JAYU Arts For Human Rights Award and co-founded Verse & Visual Expressions to amplify equity-deserving artists in their interdisciplinary creative collaborations across poetry and visual art.

Panel Discussion: Connecting with the Ancestors through the Archive

Thursday, March 13, 6pm–7:30pm
Hart House Debates Room

Join us for this insightful panel bringing together artists, historians, and scholars who have explored archives and ancestral memory to craft powerful artistic and scholarly responses to the Black Atlantic.

Featuring Dr. Shauna Sweeney, Dr. Seika Boye, Dr. Karina Vernon, and Dr. Melanie J. Newton, this conversation will be moderated by Dr. Alissa Trotz.

Shauna Sweeney is a historian of Slavery and Freedom, Gender, and the African Diaspora, and was the 2016–18 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. She is currently working on A Free Enterprise: Market Women, Insurgent Economies and the Making of Caribbean Freedom, a book manuscript that examines how, in an era when violent subjugation to the plantation economy has enslaved peoples’ primary experience of Atlantic capitalism, they nevertheless vigorously defended a set of customary rights to cultivate, harvest, and sell goods from their own provision grounds. Dr. Sweeney’s work has been supported by a Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and a Mainzer Fellowship from New York University.

Seika Boye is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies and Director of its Institute for Dance Studies. A scholar, writer, educator, and artist, her research explores Blackness and dance in Canada, as well as embodied learning and pedagogy. She curated It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 (2018) and co-curated Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (2019). A former professional dancer (1995–2010), she performed and choreographed across Canada. Boye has received numerous awards, including the Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Trust Award (2020). She was Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018) and is a co-investigator on Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Canadian Performance.

Karina Vernon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. She is the co-editor, with Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo), of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens, forthcoming), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation.

Melanie J. Newton is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic World History. She is the author of The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (2008) and has published widely on indigeneity, decolonization, and conquest in the Caribbean. She has held key academic roles, including Director of the Caribbean Studies Program and Tricampus Graduate Chair for History (2024–29). From 1996–98, she served on the Barbados Constitution Review Commission, whose recommendation led to Barbados becoming a republic in 2021. She also co-chaired Toronto’s Community Advisory Committee on renaming Dundas St. and Yonge-Dundas Square.

Alissa Trotz is a Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and the Director of Women and Gender Studies. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health. For the past 17 years has edited “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News.

Panel Discussion: Our ancestors’ wildest dreams

Friday, March 14, 3:30pm–5pm
University College, UC140

Join a dynamic panel of multidisciplinary artists—Ésery Mondésir, Dr. Emilie Jabouin, Diane Roberts, and Dr. SA Smythe—as they explore how history, personal and collective archives, memory, ancestry, and legacy inform their creative practices, community engagement, and world-making. This conversation will be moderated by Ésery Mondésir.

Dr. Emilie “Zila” Jabouin is a dance artist, choreographer, speaker, and communications scholar focused on liberation and collective healing. Apprenticing with Peniel Guerrier (NYC) in Haitian folklore since 2020, Emilie “Zila” Jabouin, PhD, is a dance artist, choreographer, speaker, and communications scholar whose work focuses on liberation and collective healing. Apprenticing with Peniel Guerrier (NYC) in Haitian folklore since 2020, she integrates drum, song, and dance into her creations. Zila performed as an ancestor in Camille Turner’s Nave (2022) and created Womb Secrets (2023), exploring interrupted pregnancies, expanding into The Release. Her upcoming work, Jérémie, au cœur de ma vie, adresses Les Vêpres massacre (1964) in Haïti. Founder of DO GWE dance & research, she bridges performance and scholarship to amplify silenced histories. Her acclaimed article on Black women dancers received an honourable mention from the Canadian Historical Association. She has performed in Canada, the U.S., and Haiti. (emiliejabouin.ca)

Ésery Mondésir is a Haitian-born artist-filmmaker and educator based in Toronto. A former high school teacher and labour organizer, his work engages personal and collective memory, everyday life, and archives to examine society from within the undercommons. His films, created in collaboration with the Haitian diaspora, have been exhibited globally at venues like the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Norton Museum of Art. An Assistant Professor at OCAD University, he researches process cinema, handmade moving images, and migration. Mondésir holds an MFA from York University and has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts. His accolades include the Paavo and Aino Lukkari Human Rights Award and the 2025 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts finalist recognition.

Diane Roberts is an accomplished director, dramaturge, writer and cultural animator, who has collaborated with innovative theatre visionaries and interdisciplinary artists for the past 30 years. Her directorial and dramaturgical work has been seen on stages across Canada and her reputation as a mentor, teacher, and community collaborator is nationally and internationally recognized. The roots of storytelling and multi-disciplinary art forms (mixing of ritual song, dance, storytelling, live art and theatre) drive her arts practice as a director, dramaturg, and cultural animator. Her intuitive style of facilitation draws on specifically crafted creative engagement tools that inspire artists of all disciplines and cultural backgrounds to unearth their authentic creative impulses. She is currently a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar, and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship award holder.

Dr. SA Smythe is a critical theorist, transmedia storyteller, and multi-instrumentalist exploring Black belonging and thriving beyond borders. Their antecartographic practice blends blktrans poetics, performance, sculpture, soundscape, monoprints, and archival ephemera, rooted in anticolonial and Black feminist traditions. Smythe is Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive and Director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at the University of Toronto. They edit Troubling the Grounds and Transnational Black Studies and are the author of Where Blackness Meets the Sea (forthcoming) and [proclivity], a poetry collection and transmedia performance. A 2022 Rome Prize recipient, 2023–24 MacDowell Fellow, and 2025 Banff Centre artist-in-residence, they are shortlisted for the 2025 Creative Capital Award. Smythe actively organizes with Black, trans, and migrant justice movements across Turtle Island, Europe, and the Mediterranean while serving on advisory boards for liberation and culture.

Artist Keynote: Camille Turner

Friday, March 14, 6pm–7pm
University College, UC 140

Followed by a reception from 7pm–9pm
University of Toronto Art Centre

In this public keynote presentation, artist and scholar Camille Turner sets out the central themes and research methodology of her artistic practice and the interdisciplinary visual and sonic artworks presented in her exhibition Otherworld on view at the Art Museum through March 22, 2025.

This event will be followed by a reception to celebrate the exhibition with Camille, the community, and colleagues. At the reception, experience a taste of the new world cuisine that emerged from the trade in saltfish, sugar, molasses and rum.

What will you carry with you to a future where all are free?

Camille Turner is an artist and scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice an Afronautic methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future.

Camille is a graduate of OCAD University and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a Provost’s postdoctoral fellowship 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. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections including: National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, The Wedge Collection, The Rooms, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. (camilleturner.com)

Afrofuturist Movements: African Dance Workshop with Miss Coco Murray and Coco Collective

Saturday, March 15, 12:30pm–2:30pm
Hart House Fitness Centre, Dance and Exercise Room

Through unified sound and rhythm, artist-scholar and dance educator Collette Murray (aka Miss Coco Murray) and musicians lead participants in a dance and movement workshop.

Collette ‘Coco’ Murray is a multi-award-winning artist-scholar, cultural arts programmer, dance educator, and arts consultant. With over 20 years in the Canadian arts sector, she specializes in Afro-diasporic dance forms from the West African region, Caribbean Folk, carnival arts, and stilt-walking explorations as Coco Moko Jumbie. As an advocate for equity in the arts, her artistry extends beyond performance to teaching, arts education, mentoring, doctoral research, curation, community arts engagement, and publications. Miss Coco Murray is her mobile dance education business, informed by her research and praxis in advancing cultural dance education, anti-racism in dance and inclusion of African diasporic arts knowledge. She is the artistic director of Coco Collective, creating culturally relevant and responsive programming with African and Caribbean arts. Murray received international recognition by the National Dance Education Organization’s 2023 Outstanding Leadership in Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Dance Education.

Closing Keynote: gli tXh! Performance and Celebration

Saturday, March 15, 3pm–6pm
University College, UC179

Followed by a community gathering at 6pm
University College, Paul Cadario Conference Centre

In this closing keynote address, multi-genre writer m. nourbeSe ponders the technological currents that converge in her landmark, eponymous poem Zong! (also the name of the 18th century slave ship), which focuses on enslaved Africans massacred for insurance purposes. gli tXh!, the project, explores the congruences, resonances, and dissonances that appear when contemporary and current digital technologies encounter the legacies of the spiritual and artistic technologies of Africa. Zong! as told to the Author by Setaey Adamu is one such example.

Using the gli tXh text, Zong!, as a departure point, m. nourbeSe invited a group of multidisciplinary artists to engage with the notion of the “gli tXh” in relation to their own practices. The artists—Kobena Aquaa Harrison (music), Otoniya J. Okot Bitek (poetry), Yasmine (Saysah) Hassen (performance), Sistah Lois Jacob (music, performance), Y Josephine (percussion, visual art), Bushra Junaid (visual art), Amai Kuda (music), Charmaine Lurch (visual art), Vivienne Scarlett (dance), and Natalie Wood (visual art)—will share their explorations and insights.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Born in Tobago, m. nourbeSe is a former lawyer and an unembedded poet and writer who lives in the space-time of Toronto. Best known for her genre-breaking book-length epic, Zong!, she is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award and the 2021 recipient of the Canada Council Arts Molson Prize and a recipient of the 2024 Wyndam-Campbell prize for poetry.

Sistah Lois, aka Afrikan Princess n SOLD is an incredibly talented thespian, vocalist that has been known to awaken, inspire, motivate, educate, and entertain.

Born in Trinidad, immigrated to Manitoba as a small child, she calls Toronto home.

Another phenomenal wombman and multiple disciplines artist, writer of song, plays, poems, a community activist who uses her gifts of musical storytelling to have profound impacts on all who are fortunate enough to experience her in action!

Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, she explores history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting. Pivoting on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea, her landmark curatorial project, What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic (The Rooms, 2020), featured video, mixed media, mural, and photo-based works alongside rare archival items. She co-curated New-Found-Lands (2016) at Eastern Edge Gallery and authored The Possible Lives of WH, Sailor, a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist. She has exhibited across Canada and the US, with work held in public, private and corporate collections.

Natalie Wood is an award-winning Trinidadian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and activist. Her work is politically engaged, challenges hegemonic systems, and is rooted in Black feminist, queer, and diasporic identities. Natalie utilizes recyclable materials, drawing, painting, printmaking, video and installation in her art. She is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

Charmaine Lurch is a conceptual artist and educator whose work draws attention to the complex relationships between humans, other-than-humans, and the environment. Lurch’s paintings and sculptures are conversations on infrastructure and the spaces and places we inhabit. Working with a range of materials and reimagining our surroundings—from bees and taxi cabs to The Tempest and quiet moments of joy—Lurch subtly connects us to the landscape, inviting entry points into overwhelmingly complex and urgent racial and ecological matters. Her work can be found in public spaces, in private collections and in numerous publications.

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her three books of poetry are: 100 Days, A is for, and Song & Dread. Her first novel, We, the Kindling, has recently been published by Alchemy, Random House. Otoniya’s contribution to the gli tXh project is a poem entitled: If We’re Still Counting Days in audio as well as in print.

Y Josephine is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends music, performance, and visual art. As a jazz, rock, blues, and Latin singer, as well as a percussionist, her artistry is rooted in rhythm, passion, and storytelling.

Her visual art mirrors the improvisational spirit of jazz, combining bold textures, colours, and emotions. Each piece tells a story—nostalgic, bold, and deeply connected to movement and memory. Whether through the sultry tones of jazz, the raw energy of rock, or expressive brushstrokes, she captures the essence of human experience.

With exhibitions in multiple cities and performances that captivate audiences, Y Josephine continues to push creative boundaries. Her latest work merges music and visual art into an immersive experience, reflecting her evolving artistic vision.

Gogo Amai Kuda Yemoja Ile is a musician, Sangoma (spirit medium/healer), mother and the Founder/Director of the Sankofa Maroon Village. She inherited her spiritual gifts from her great grandmother, a Tobagonian Obeah woman, Ti Miss Maam; who has helped guide her through her twenty-two years of training and work as a spirit medium and healer. Gogo Amai was initiated as ancestral medium in 2014, and as a Sangoma and medium of water spirits in 2017. She further upgraded her qualifications by training with the well-respected Nganga/Sangoma, Gogo Mangwenya, based in Zimbabwe. She has also been practicing and studying Ifa for over sixteen years and is initiated as a Bride of Shango.

Saysah moves through the world with a deep intention to be in right relationship with their body, their community and the land. They are always in the process of (un)becoming—an ever-evolving learner, maker, and mover. As a multi-sensorial artist, Saysah’s journey weaves together different forms of expression, all guided by sensory exploration. Their practice is one of disruption; peeling back the layers of knowledge systems and re-membering what has been left for us. Through their work, they build spaces for co-creation, where community-building, ritual-theatre, and archive come together in a shared approach. These elements are deeply informed by their earth-work teachings, where land and water are vital teachers and collaborators — honouring these guides, moving with a commitment to reciprocity.

Vivine is Founder and Global Engagement Advisor for dance Immersion, an organization that presents, produces, and supports dancers and dances of the African Diaspora. As former Artistic Director and performing member of the Usafiri Dance & Drum Ensemble, Vivine created and presented works in both traditional-influenced African and contemporary African dance styles. Ms. Scarlett’s passion has manifested many experiences that have served Canadian artists of African descent with opportunities that have laid a foundation for continued growth and representation. Over her career, Vivine has been the recipient of many awards, some of which include: the Muriel Sherrin Award, Dance Ontario Lifetime Achievement Award, and Planet Africa Heritage Award. Her choreographic endeavours won her a Dora Mavor Moore in the theatre production of The Adventures of a Black Girl in search of God. Vivine continues her creative explorations as a consultant, administrator, and choreographer.

Kobèna Aquaa-Harrison: eclectic Ghanaian/ Bermudian performer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, with awards spanning music, film, television, media, dance, theatre and opera, including several Dora, Chalmers, TAMA and JUNO contributions with diverse spoken word, children’s and world music artists.

Kobè’s trademark, “Afrosonic jollof” is “the sound of jazz, rock, R&B and dance music coming face to face with its roots”. His all-star, Djungle Bouti Orchestra delivers paradigm-shifting music and humour to Presidents, Prime Ministers and preschoolers, at festivals, theatres and special events. Kobè’s self-built instruments include electric guitar, marimba and the 17th century “seperewa”. He is an in-demand soloist and accompanist, with works for FIFA, Nissan, Soulpepper, Shaw & Stratford Festivals, CBC, CanStage, Dance Immersion etc.The founder of Michèzo! Festival, former AfroFest President/Artistic Director and CKLN radio host, is Cultural Development Director at Abandze Embassy—the creative oasis at the heart of Vogue magazine’s 2nd coolest neighbourhood in the world. (@paapakobe)

A Journey through Otherworld Presenting Partner

Image Credits:

1—Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (still), 2019. Photo: LF Documentation.
2—Afronautic Research Lab: Workshop with Outerregion, September 2024, University of Toronto Art Centre. Photo: Grant Martin.
3—Andrean Lim via Canva.com.
4—Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Shauna Sweeney, Photo by Craig Boyko, Photo by Diana Tyszko, Courtesy of Melanie J Newton, Photo by Geoffrey Vendeville.
5—Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of the artist, Photo by Polina Teif, Courtesy of Diane Roberts, Photo by Elliott Tilleczek.
6—Camille Turner, Sticks and Bones (still), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
7—Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra Cultural Cabaret. Photo courtesy of Collette Murray.
8—Clockwise from top left: Photo by Gail Nyoka, Courtesy of Sistah Lois, Photo by Patricia Ellah, Courtesy of Natalie Wood, Photo by Anthony Gebrehiwot, Courtesy of the Otoniya J Okot Bitek, Courtesy of the Y Josephine, Courtsesy of Saysah, Photo by Samuel Engelking, Photo by Crated Dozen Photography, Courtesy of Kobèna Aquaa-Harrison.

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