Family Matters

Family Matters (2017) is an Afrofuturist video and sound installation following a mother and son who have escaped enslavement in 19th-century town of York (now known as Toronto) by time travelling to contemporary Toronto. Family Matters also includes a series of editioned photographs.

Video
• Family Matters, 2017, 11:00 (M:S), 4K Video.

Video Installation Structure
• Family Matters, 2017, 7x4x9’, structural steel, brass, wrought iron, dual    
  parabolic speaker system, 11:00 (M:S), 4K Video

Photographs (Family Matters)
• 24” x 12⅓”, edition of 5
• Colour photography

Untitled 1

Untitled 2

Untitled 3

Untitled 4

Untitled 5

Untitled 6

Untitled 7

Full Description

In their engaging Afrofuturist video and sound installation Family Matters (2017), Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai invite visitors to encounter silences haunting Canadian history. 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 earlier series Wanted (2016), Family Matters humanizes the enslaved people described in historical advertisements by challenging linear constructions of history—opening up the past to unexpected futurities.

Exhibition & Touring History

McIntosh Gallery 2017 – Shown as part of Futurisms curated by Adam Lauder

Latcham Art Centre 2019 – Shown at Whitchurch-Stouffville, Canada, as part of Where We Stand.

We would like to acknowledge:

City of Toronto

Funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Ontario Arts Council (OAC)