Camille Turner has been awarded Toronto Biennial of Art’s Artist Prize for her multimedia installation Nave (2022) which combines Afrofuturism and historical research to shed light on ‘the entanglement of colonial Canada in the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans through links between the nave of a church, the hold of the ship, the tomb, and the womb of the world’.
The winner of the biennial’s Emerging Artist Prize is Colombian artist Aycoobo / Wilson Rodríguez whose works on paper depict botanical knowledge shared by his father, Abel, a sage and elder in the Nonuya Indigenous community of the Amazon’s Cahuinarí River.
Each artist will receive CAD$10,000.
The artists were chosen by a jury comprising Michelle Jacques (Chief Curator, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), Dr. Julie Nagam, (Artistic Director of Nuit Blanche 2020/2022, Toronto, Ontario) and Canadian artist Lisa Steele.
Alongside the two artist prizes, Toronto Biennial is introducing two new prize categories to be awarded in June 2022. The winners of the Audience Artist Prize and Programs Prize will be chosen by public vote via an online platform.
