Camille Turner & Yaniya Lee: Black History Navigational Toolkit

About the Tool

This is a deck of playing cards like no other. There are twenty cards in total – choose a card, and let it guide you through Toronto’s Black histories, and the personal narratives of artist Camille Turner and writer Yaniya Lee. This is a Black History Navigational Toolkit — use it as such, navigating your way through Little Jamaica, Scarborough, and Blackhurst, stories of Black history and resilience in Toronto and beyond.

This [excerpted] conversation, held on November 17, 2021, was moderated by Mark Soo. It is included in full in the TBA publication Water, Kinship, Belief, co-published by the Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Metropole, and available for purchase at Art Metropole.

Camille Turner: Our project for the 2022 Toronto Biennial is called the Black History Navigational Toolkit. Yaniya, what you and I were asked to do was to create a Black history context brief. This would be something that would give Biennial artists and visitors a context for Black histories in Toronto, and more broadly, the ways in which Black people exist in this city. It’s a vast history. How do we represent it? What we decided on is a deck of twenty large playing cards.

Yaniya Lee: Camille, when we first talked about the proposition of this project, we knew right away that we didn’t want this history to be something easily digestible, like an A, B, C—a linear timeline of what had happened, nor a polished answer to what Blackness is in Toronto. We didn’t want to recreate a “history” that already exists in archival documents, literature, art, and oral history. Our stories exist and are out there, remembered in a variety of ways within our communities, but they are often overlooked or unacknowledged in Canadian history. We wanted to figure out a way to make the parts of those histories we chose to present more engaged. We left openings for people to fill in some of the gaps and make their own connections.

I feel like this project really melds what both of us do: we drew from some of your practice and then from some of the things that I’ve done. For example, there is my archival research and interest in certain Black Canadian art histories, specifically in Toronto. Then there are the live projects that you’ve done, Camille, such as audio walks that tell these stories in different ways.