Roshini Kempadoo (born Crawley, Sussex, England,[1] 1959) is a British photographer, media artist, and academic. For more than 20 years she has been a lecturer and researcher in photography, digital media production, and cultural studies in a variety of educational institutions, and is currently a professor in Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.[2][3]
Her photography has been concerned with women's issues and issues of representation, particularly of black people.[4] In her research, multimedia, and photographic projects, which explore the visual representation of the Caribbean,[5] she combines "factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences with history and memory ...[and] her recent work as a digital image artist includes photographs and screen-based interactive art installations that fictionalize Caribbean archive material, objects, and spaces."[6]
Roshini Kempadoo was born in Crawley, Sussex, England,[1] having spent a decade of her childhood in the Caribbean, from where her family originates. As she describes her background,
"You could say my parents were part of the 'Windrush Generation'. My father (Peter Kempadoo) arrived in London in the 1950s, but my family moved back and forth between the UK and the Caribbean. I was born in England and returned to the Caribbean as a child. I spent my formative years, between the ages of 11-18, in Jamaica and Guyana. I had the good fortune of knowing the Caribbean very well through my experiences growing up in Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana."[4]
She attended St. Rose's High SchoolinGeorgetown, Guyana, and returned to the UK for her university education in 1977 (her family relocated to Saint Lucia shortly afterwards). She studied Visual Communications at undergraduate level, specializing in Photography in her final year, and subsequently earning a master's degree in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby.[4]
Kempadoo joined Format, the women's photographic agency conceived by Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer, and was also involved in establishing the first Black British photographic association, Autograph ABP, together with Monika Baker, Sunil Gupta, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Armet Francis.[4][7] She pursued a photographic career from the 1980s and '90s onwards:
it was a period of time in which we were re-defining representations of the black subject. It was an exciting period of time where photography and film moved away from traditional visual arts studies and became more radically linked to cultural studies and criticism. Photography of this kind became situated outside fine art studies, and this broader interdisciplinary field allowed me to consider photography in relation to notions of psychoanalysis, post-colonialism and feminist studies, drawing on the seminal texts of Stuart Hall, Susan Sontag, Laura Mulvey and John Berger to think about photography.[4]
She also counts among her influences colleagues such as John Akomfrah, Sunil Gupta, Ingrid Pollard and Keith Piper, in addition to those involved with publishing the international independent photographic magazine Ten.8, among them Derek Bishton, Rhonda Wilson (with whom she co-edited the Spectrum Women's Photography Festival exhibition catalogue, published as a special supplement to issue 30 of the magazine)[8] and John Taylor.[4]
She has exhibited regularly internationally, including in Trinidad, Toronto (curated by Sheila Petty, University of Regina), New York and the Netherlands. A major retrospective of her photographic and digital art, Roshini Kempadoo: Works 1990 – 2004, opened at the PM Gallery and House in 2004 and subsequently toured.[9]
Her work has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Autograph ABP, London, and is in the collections of other institutions and individuals, including Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, US, and the Birmingham Museum and Libraries Collection UK.[10]
She is the author of the book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure (2016).
She is the daughter of artist Rosemary Kempadoo. who had been taught by Guyanese painter Stanley Greaves and was part of a network of artists in Georgetown in the 1970s that included Aubrey Williams. Her father is the writer Peter Kempadoo.[4] She is from a family of nine children. One of her sisters is the sexology professor Kamala Kempadoo, and her youngest sister is the novelist Oonya Kempadoo.[11] She lives with her husband and long term companion Paul Wilcox in London.
2001: Virtual Exiles. Lighthouse Media Arts Centre, Wolverhampton, UK (January) and Galeria Moderna, Ljubljana, Slovenia, for Mesto Zensk, City of Women festival (October).
2004: Roshini Kempadoo: Works 1990 – 2004. Tour included a new commission "endless prospects" at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, UK (July–September)
1990 Autoportraits, curated by Autograph, Camerawork, London, with Monika Baker, Allan deSouza, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Mumtaz Karimjee, and Roshini Kempadoo.[12]
2002: Artwork commission Back Routes CD-Rom for the exhibition Travelogue: Views of Britain by seven contemporary artists, curated by Mary Griffiths for Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (June–September).
2003: Global Detail, curated by Wim Melis for the Nooderlicht PhotoFestival, 2003, Groningen, Netherlands.
2006–07: Latitudes 2006 - Terres de Amazonie, Hotel de Ville, Paris (included a selection from the series Virtual Exiles). Curated by Regine Cuzin (December–January 2007)
2007: "Back Routes: Historical articulation in Multimedia Production", in Grossman, A., and A. O'Brien (eds), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 199–215. ISBN190567404X.
2007: "Digital media practice as critique: Roshini Kempadoo's installations Ghosting and endless prospects (2004)", in Arana, V. (ed.), "Black" British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 283–296. ISBN1-84718-116-3.
2008: "Photographing Here/There", in Into the Open: Ania Dabrowska & John Nassari. London, Four Corners Gallery. pp. 38–39.
2010: "Interpolating screen bytes: Critical commentary in multimedia artworks", Journal of Media Practice, 11(1), 59–80.
^M. Linda, Dana, "Kempadoo, Oonya", Oxford African American Studies Center.
^Keen, M., and E. Ward (1996). Recordings: A select bibliography of Contemporary African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian British Art. Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in collaboration with Chelsea College of Art and Design.
