Roshini Kempadoo


Roshini Kempadoo 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 lecturer at the University of East London. She also gives regular academic and artist presentations nationally and internationally.
Her photography has been concerned with women's issues and issues of representation, particularly of black people. In her research, multimedia, and photographic projects, which explore the visual representation of the Caribbean, she combines "factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences with history and memory... her recent work as a digital image artist includes photographs and screen-based interactive art installations that fictionalize Caribbean archive material, objects, and spaces."

Early life and education

Roshini Kempadoo was born in Crawley, Sussex, England, but 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 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."

She attended St. Rose's High School in Georgetown, Guyana, and returned to the UK for her university education in 1977. She studied visual communications, specializing in Photography in her final year, and subsequently earning a master's degree in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby.

Career

She 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. 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."
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 and John Taylor.
She has exhibited regularly internationally, including in Trinidad, Toronto, New York and Holland. 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.
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.
She is the author of the book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure.

Personal life

She is the daughter of artist Rosemary Kempadoo. who had been taught by 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, and novelist Oonya Kempadoo is her youngest sister.

Selected exhibitions

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