CAMAL PIRBHAI and CAMILLE TURNER
Family Matters, 2017
6144 x 3160 6K Video
11:00
Peggy: Camille Turner
Jupiter: Rajean Hoilett
Composer: Ravi Naimpally
Audio Recording Engineer: David Travers-Smith
DOP/Editor: Jalani Morgan
Camera Operator/Motion Graphics Designer: Juan Angel
Gaffer: Q’mal Labad-Workman
Welder: Dawson Calvert
Many thanks to: Charles Street Video, Jovana Pirbhai, Heidi Pirbhai, Luka Prince Pirbhai, Natasha Douglas and Memengwaans
Isaac-Sands.
RIVERSIDE PARK
Family Matters, 2017, is an Afrofuturist video and sound installation that follows a mother and son who have escaped 19th century slavery in Canada by time travelling to contemporary Toronto, Ontario.
A collaborative project by Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai, this work addresses aspects of Canadian history that are not predominantly discussed or taught in schools. In the context of current widespread uprisings against systemic racism this work illuminates important histories that inform the present.
Realized during a residency with Charles Street Video, the work was inspired by an advertisement posted in the Upper Canada Gazette in February, 1806 by Peter Russell, an administrator in Upper Canada, offering Peggy Pompadour and her son Jupiter for sale. The mother and son are two of the enslaved people that Russell legally claimed as his property. In Family Matters Peggy and Jupiter travel through time to visit contemporary Toronto where their plight illuminates the ongoing co-constitution of past and present. Like the artist’s earlier series Wanted, 2016, Family Matters humanizes enslaved people described in historical advertisements by challenging linear constructions of history—opening up the past to unexpected futurities.
Camille Turner is an explorer of race, space, home and belonging. Straddling media, social practice and performance art, her work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally. Wanted, a collaboration with Camal Pirbhai, was shown most recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, and uses the trope of fashion to transform 18th century newspaper posts by Canadian slave owners into contemporary fashion ads. Freedom Tours, created collaboratively with Cree-Metis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a national commission for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017 that consists of participatory, site-specific events that re-imagine and reanimate land and water from Black and Indigenous perspectives.
The Afronautic Research Lab is a reading room in which participants encounter buried histories. The Landscape of Forgetting, a walk created collaboratively with Alana Bartol and sonic walks HUSH HARBOUR and The Resistance of Peggy Pompadour evoke sites of Black memory that reimagine the Canadian landscape. Miss Canadiana, one of her earliest projects, challenges perceptions of Canadian-ness and troubles the unspoken binary of “real Canadian” and “diverse other.” Turner is the founder of Outerregion, an Afrofuturist performance group. She has lectured at various institutions including the University of Toronto, Algoma University and Toronto School of Art and is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario and York University’s Masters in Environmental Studies Program, Toronto, Ontario, where she is currently a PhD candidate.
camilleturner.com
@afrofuturist
Camal Pirbhai is a multidisciplinary artist, whose practice extends beyond his masterfully crafted, couture textile pieces, creating more explicitly conceptual works through installation, sculpture, video, photography and performance. Raised in Switzerland and mastering the skilled trade of sewing in London, UK, Pirbhai has built a career designing custom textile collections for some of the most prestigious architects and interior designers across Canada and abroad. His desire to blur the lines between design and contemporary art can be seen in his projects that merge fashion and design with sculpture, performance and new media. Since 2013, Pirbhai has collaborated with Camille Turner on a variety of projects including a site-specific exhibition Tableaux, 2014, at Scarborough’s Guildwood Park, Scarborough, Ontario; WANTED, 2016, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, and the video installation Family Matters, 2017.
Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner
Family Matters, 2017
6144 x 3160 6K Video
courtesy of the Artists
Photos: Frank Luca