After Indenture: Three Photo Stories

The three artists pictured are, left to right, Roshini Kempadoo, Sharlene Khan, and Wendy Nanan. Andil Gosine, from Cane Portraiture: The Descendants, 2016; photographs, 12 × 18 in.

• Face Up: Life and transgressive acts on screen
• Roshini Kempadoo (bio)

Face Up is a screen-based video installation of character “idents” that combine photographs and short stories about living in London.¹

As the inevitable eavesdropper, listener, earwigger, I can’t help but overhear partial conversations and oversee occurrences on screen—at the bus stop, in the supermarket queue, walking along the street.

These are starting points for imagining what happens next.

Bus 321 northbound, 24 November 2015, Lewisham, London. I witness a young black man being refused entry onto the bus. In protest, he stands in front of the vehicle, challenging the driver. The bus driver revs the engine and inches forward, escalating the state of play. The man and the driver are at an impasse. I and others look on and use phones to document and screen-share what happens next.

It soon goes viral.

Deirdre takes a look at the state of her hair using the laptop while waiting to speak to her cousin. Her connections are international and ubiquitous; she knows her Skype conversation provides her with news about family in Guyana and the place she remembers. She feels it is right to offer what she can, which may mean money, arranging documents, or accommodating an unknown relative who is passing through. As a Londoner—of color and diasporic—who knows of at least two places called “home,” she keeps track of and maintains her tenuous and multiple “identities.”

Her screen use is dynamic and multiple. It is the hyperspace for intimate correspondence that closes distance, a transparent mediated tool for gathering evidence or self-affirmation. It is a semi-autonomous sensing instrument for sharing encounters and experiences. As a popular cultural space of performance the screen becomes “profoundly mythic . . . a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies.”² As it feeds our senses as eye and ear candy, the screen facilitates her performance and acts of transgression.

It is where she and I “do” and perform life on the screen.

Roshini Kempadoo, Face Up, 2015. Screenshots from one short story (“Deirdre”). All images courtesy of the artist

Roshini Kempadoo

Roshini Kempadoo is an international photographer, media artist, and scholar creating photographs, artwork, and writing that interprets, analyzes, and reimagines historical experiences and memories as women’s visual narratives. Recent exhibitions of work and writing include Ghosts: Keith Piper and Roshini Kempadoo (2015) and Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and Location of the Caribbean Figure (2016).

Footnotes

1. Idents is derived from the promotional video sequences associated with television identification/promotional videos.

2. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 1996), 477.

Copyright © 2017 Roshini Kempadoo

• When the moon waxes red
• Sharlene Khan (bio)

Sharlene Khan, Family, 2016. Mixed media, 29 × 37 cm. Courtesy of the artist

“Do you think it’s possible to want somebody to die even before you are birth? I think I did, even while in my mother’s womb. Before my eyes could see, my ears heard. Her screaming. Her pleading and begging for him to stop. I felt her distress.

“And I hated. Strangely, my life began with a lack of fear—surely I should have felt fear at the brutalities my stepfather executed. But I didn’t. Not that he threatened to hit me—in fact, he seemed to love me as his own. Wanted me to be his. But we knew I wasn’t. And when he smiled lovingly at me, I don’t remember smiling back...