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

Abstract

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