Announcing the Art Museum’s Fall 2024 Exhibition Season

Celebrate the opening reception of Otherworld and Labour on Wednesday, September 4

Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab, 2016–present. Installation view and performance at Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2016). Photography by Sandra Brewster.

Otherworld

September 4, 2024 – March 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 4, 6pm–8pm
University of Toronto Art Centre, 15 King’s College Circle

Otherworld is the first major solo museum exhibition by Camille Turner in Toronto. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Turner is widely recognized for her transformative examination of Black history in the Canadian national narrative. The immersive exhibition, which comprises new and past works in video, performance, and digital and sonic media, is grounded in Turner’s uniquely developed Afronautic research methodology—blending Afrofuturism and historical research. Working from the point of view of a liberated future, the exhibition traces Canada’s entanglement in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans as buried in the archives.

Special support for this project has been provided by the Jackman Humanities Institute as part of its 2024–25 annual theme, Undergrounds/Underworlds. Research for this exhibition was developed through a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture, and Design (2022–24).

Martine Syms, Intro to Threat Modeling, 2018. Digital video (colour, sound), 04:32 minutes. Edition of 5 plus | AP. Courtesy of the artist.

Labour

September 4, 2024 – March 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 4, 6pm–8pm
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 7 Hart House Circle

Works by Natalie Asumeng, La Tanya S. Autry, Tony Cokes, Chantal Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Martine Syms

Inspired by Claudia Rankine’s scholarship on microaggressions in Citizen: An American Lyric and themes of perceptibility, Labour seeks to unveil the invisible labour of the colonized. The exhibition challenges societal racial biases through the lens of Blackness and Indigeneity, exploring, among other concerns, how unseen labour might be unburdened and shifted onto the dominant. The evocative works examine white supremacy’s manifestation in institutional power paradigms and its corrosive effects on Black and Indigenous people and people of colour. In so doing, this exhibition operationalizes and reveals unseen labour while activating alternative teachings from Black and Indigenous perspectives. By reimagining how the colonized perceive, engage with, and ultimately challenge the forces that shape our world, Labour becomes a powerful site of defiance.

Sanaz Sohrabi, Future Relics, 2021–ongoing. Digital collage, manual superimposed inkjet prints on Matt paper, size variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents

September 11, 2024 – June 30, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 4pm–6pm
Jackman Humanities Institute, 170 St. George St., 10th Floor

Works by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Alvin Luong, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Beichen Zhang

Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents posits the underground as a rhizomatic common to consider the imperceptible nexuses within a fractured land of colonial extraction. From rare earth minerals to undersea infrastructures, subterranean petroleum sites to suburban sewage holes, the morphing landscape of colonial extraction reveals amnesias of a past rendered invisible to the optics, hidden underground and growing hauntingly present the deeper we move. The underground sites of extractive regimes, with their distinct localities, bring into conversation the geophysical, geopolitical, and geological repercussions of neoliberalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2024–25 research theme Undergrounds/Underworlds.

Public Programs

Opening Reception: Fall 2024 Exhibitions
Wednesday, September 4, 6pm–8pm
University of Toronto Art Centre and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

At 6:30pm, join us at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Hart House for opening remarks for Labour. At 7pm, join us at the University of Toronto Art Centre in University College for opening remarks for Otherworld.

Artist Tour: Otherworld, with Camille Turner
Saturday, September 7, 2pm–4pm
University of Toronto Art Centre

The free public guided tour will immerse visitors in a non-linear Afronautic journey spanning centuries and continents, through silenced pasts and awakened histories, offering places of recovery and of dreaming a liberated future.

Opening Reception: Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents
Wednesday, September 11, 4pm–6pm
Jackman Humanities Institute

Celebrate the opening of Morphing Land, Impalpable Currents, an exhibition that posits the underground as a rhizomatic commons to consider the imperceptible nexuses within a fractured land of colonial extraction.

For more information about the Art Museum’s fall public programs, visit: artmuseum.utoronto.ca/programs/

Visiting the Art Museum

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
(in Hart House)
7 Hart House Circle
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H3

University of Toronto Art Centre
(in University College)
15 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H7

Admission is free. All are welcome.

Museum Hours
Tuesday to Saturday, 12 noon–5pm
Wednesday, 12 noon–8pm
Sunday and Monday closed

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artmuseum@utoronto.ca
416-978-8398

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Our Supporters

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto gratefully acknowledges operating support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario, and the Toronto Arts Council.

Media Contact: Marianne Rellin, marianne.rellin@utoronto.ca