Ghosting (2004) in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now

Tate Britain presents a landmark group exhibition celebrating 70 years of Caribbean-British art This exhibition explores the work of artists from the Caribbean who made their home in Britain, alongside other British artists whose work has been influenced and inspired by Caribbean themes and heritage. Spanning visionary paintings to documentary photography, fashion, film and sculpture, Life Between Islands traces the extraordinary breadth and impact of Caribbean British art, in one setting. This exhibition celebrates how people from the Caribbean have forged new communities and identities in post-war Britain – and in doing so have transformed what British culture and society looks like today

Roshini Kempadoo - Ghosting: INDIA - Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art

An edition of 10 giclée photographic prints (52cm x 102cm) were printed and exhibited in the exhibition FotoFest 2018 Biennial: INDIA - Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, curated by Sunil Gupta and Steven Evans, Houston, USA. Similar to Willis and DeCarava are the ways in which Ghosting is created with photographs as indelible prompters to memory and imagination, conjuring other possibilities of being and living. Ghosting is created from the historical traces of Trinidad and its interconnectedness to Britain, India and West Africa, evoked through the plantation landscape as a legacy of slavery and indentureship. Conceived as a multimedia single screen-based artwork of spoken word and still images for the retrospective Roshini Kempadoo: Works 1990 – 2004, Ghosting is manipulated and layered images as a series of photographic prints. These fragmented, disjointed stories are about the workers who sustained the plantation. Ghosting invites you to reconsider plantation life through Mary Louise, Ram, Elsie, and other fictional characters conjured from historical figures and events. As characters, they reveal narratives and life experiences of resilience, canniness, violence, and loss. The characters are based on absent images, unwritten diary accounts, and buildings long demolished in the plantation landscape. Ghosting traces plantation life stories in which there was little choice —after all, there was no escaping it. It was their reason for being in Trinidad, and in becoming Trinidadian

Roshini Kempadoo - Ghosting Portfolio pages in the 2018 Fotofest Biennial Catalogue - INDIA: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art

Roshini Kempadoo - Ghosting Portfolio pages in the 2018 Fotofest Biennial Catalogue - INDIA: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art. “Nineteen fifty-five was also the year Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava published The Sweet Flypaper of Life, … the photographs spoke to me in a manner that I will never forget, and they led me ask questions about the photographs we had in our house.”1 Deborah Willis’ words resonate with my looking, thinking about and creating photographs. The album photograph becomes central to a personal reflection inextricably linked to the family home and the influential work by Hughes and DeCarava as narrators of African American culture. Similar to Willis and DeCarava are the ways in which Ghosting is created with photographs as indelible prompters to memory and imagination, conjuring other possibilities of being and living. Ghosting is created from the historical traces of Trinidad and its interconnectedness to Britain, India and West Africa, evoked through the plantation landscape as a legacy of slavery and indentureship. Conceived as a multimedia single screen-based artwork of spoken word and still images for the retrospective Roshini Kempadoo: Works 1990 – 2004, Ghosting is also manipulated and layered images as a series of photographic prints. Imagine a working plantation of days past in Trinidad. Our memory is prompted and guided by historical and contemporary photographs, documents, maps, and illustrations as representations of Trinidad. These fragmented, disjointed stories are about the workers who sustained the plantation. Ghosting invites you to reconsider plantation life through Mary Louise, Ram, Elsie, and other fictional characters conjured from historical figures and events. As characters, they reveal narratives and life experiences of resilience, canniness, violence, and loss. The characters are based on absent images, unwritten diary accounts, and buildings long demolished in the plantation landscape. Ghosting traces plantation life stories in which there was little choice —after all, there was no escaping it. It was their reason for being in Trinidad, and in becoming Trinidadian. 1 Deborah Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994), 4

Imagining Activism: Black, Gold, Dust

This photo essay explores the presence of women environmental activists. This is drawn from characters originally conceived for the initial iteration of the artwork Like Gold Dust, created while on the Artist International Residency at Artpace San Antonio, USA (2019). The artwork evokes gendered narratives about everyday survival, economics, and special powers needed for the 21st century, created in response to the oil and gas extraction off the Essequibo coast,northwest Guyana in the disputed ocean waters with neighbouring Venezuela. Women narratives, including the presence of the late Wangari Maathai, are imagined as a network of environmental activists from the black Atlantic in order to explore and trace progressive relationships between landscapes, environments and present-day life. This photo essay explores the artistic methodologies that reveal the ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon, 2011) of colonialism and capitalism as systems of extraction and what rethinking environmental activism might look like for a planetary future. It imagines women activism and presence as socially, culturally and racially transforming their/our worlds. The photo-essay and artwork develops the notion of decolonial and feminist environmental activism that Sylvia Wynter describes as ‘hybrid-auto-institutinglanguaging-storytelling,’ practice that involves narrating ourselves into existence

Digital Media Practice as Critique: Roshini Kempadoo's Installations: Ghosting and Endless Prospects

Kempadoo's chapter was first published (2009) in the publication Black British Aesthetics Today, edited by Victoria Arana, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle. I reflect on two interactive artworks/installations created take their starting point from Caribbean historical characters and events to engender an imagined creolised experience

Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s–Now exhibition book

This exhibition book traces the connection between Britain and the Caribbean in the visual arts from the 1950s to today, a social and cultural history more often told through literature or popular music. A multi-generational perspective, the catalogue reveals that the Caribbean connection in British art is one of the richest facets of art in Britain since the Second World War, and is a lens through which to understand the Caribbean diasporic experience in all its social, cultural, psychological and political complexities across generations. The catalogue features some 40 artists of the exhibition It is arranged chronologically, edited by Alex Farquharson and David A. Bailey, with contributions by a variety of authors, including Paul Gilroy, Gilane Tawadros and fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner

Like Gold Dust (2019) (selection) in the exhibition Intersectional Geographies

In 2021 Martin Parr Foundation held an open call for a UK-based curator to present a photographic exhibition in the MPF gallery and Jacqueline Ennis Cole has been selected for her proposed group show, Intersectional Geographies. Intersectional Geographies brings together a diverse selection of photographers whose works address inclusion within society at a time of climate crisis, social distancing and human rights violations. Each photographer highlights a concern that resonates with them. Participating artists Ignacio Acosta / Rhiannon Adam/ Lisa Barnard/ Jacqueline Ennis-Cole / Darek Fortas/Roshini Kempadoo / Miranda Pennell / Judy Rabinowitz Price / Xavier Ribas / David Severn / Aida Silvestri/ Janine Wiede