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

Abstract

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