In the inaugural episode of season three, artist Camille Turner talks with Qanita Lilla about how she balances humour, healing and storytelling to recover Black histories in Canada. In her work, Camille lovingly assembles the detritus of the archive, with its sparse and often painful accounts of Black life. She invokes personas and performance, like in Miss Canadiana and Afronautic Research Lab, Camille navigates the currents of submerged histories and resurfaces stories lost in the archive. As the Afronaut and Miss Canadiana fall into the past, they project the future and conjure new liberated possibilities.

Camille Turner’s Nave (2022) is on view as part of Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys (21 November 2024- 11 May 2025), a travelling exhibition, developed by Agnes and hosted by Museum London.

Have you ever wondered: What is the purpose of an artist in the world today?

We are back with a third season of With Opened Mouths: The Podcast. The podcast that makes space for artists, poets, performers, activists and curators to speak for themselves. I’m your host Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator, Arts of Africa at Agnes Etherington Art Center.

Join us as we hear stories about creative visions that powerfully convey why art and artists are critically important right now. In this season my guests and I discuss: ways of being in the world, possibilities for liberatory futures, the essential nature of collective practice and the need for Spiritual growth—all as means for Survival!

Episodes of With Opened Mouths are released monthly, and you can find them on Digital Agnes, CFRC’s website and on your favourite podcasting platform starting in January 2025!

Make sure to subscribe now so that you don’t miss a single episode!

Emelie Chhangur, Director Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre talks with Qanita Lilla about her radical curatorial practice. Growing up in Paris, Ontario in an assimilationist paradigm, she talks of harnessing experimentation and rejecting the confines of the status quo. Emelie’s lived experience of cultural mixing and of negotiating multiple worlds allows her to open up curatorial practice to non-Western traditions but also to bring together forms that might not have a natural affinity. She describes her practice as scrappy, experimental and unexpected worldmaking that started in a bright yellow kitchen.

Show notes: https://bit.ly/3CU6Znk

Transcript: https://bit.ly/3kiWzaw

With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is hosted by Dr Qanita Lilla and produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.

Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021.

The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez.

The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.