Research insights
Face Up (2015) explores diasporic life in an international cityscape. My screen-based gallery installation builds on smartphone-based technologies and aesthetics. It extends the photographic medium by using post-production software and poetic sensibility. The resulting visual/written artwork reflects London as a supercity in which migration for work opportunities and to escape danger abroad is commonplace, yet for many who make the trip life remains precarious.
The video develops the aesthetic form of the smartphone as an art installation, using it as a critical language for social and cultural commentary. Face Up was created using concepts involving mimicry, re-purposing and simulation. It evokes characters (using actors in performance, stop-animation, greenscreen studio work) while deploying social media production values and techniques (instant messaging, dating software appearance) to consciously focus on the smartphone as a social and cultural prosthetic. It inserts social media and smartphone content, such as viral videos, to provide a critical sense of urban lives that navigate issues of race, difference and other matters associated with diasporic life experiences.
Face Up offers a fresh view of diasporic lives in a networked cityscape. The insights it delivers are a product of my methodological approach, which is explored more fully in ‘Urban Candy: Screens, Selfies and Imaginings’, a chapter in Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (2019). “Urban Candy” is “a state of becoming: identities are in formation and in motion, in an ongoing relationship to the smartphone screen”. The chapter is a component of this submission (see Key Facts) and I quote from it here to underline certain insights from my research:
“...Urban Candy is considered a seductive, hypervisualised space of self and screen associated with the city, a perpetual line of sight, an excessive physical and virtual urban experience and environment… Central to this is the racialised and diasporised networked body on the move, precarious in her condition and affective in the performative encounter with herself and others.” (Kempadoo, 2019, p302).
Alternative methodological approaches and concepts underpin the video’s composition and narrative. The artwork, for instance, embraces the notion of the “poor image” (Steyerl) as a counterpoint to the “polished” production values associated with digitised imagery. As articulated in the book chapter, unreconstructed imagery and online content are brought together to create scenes for the introduction of imaginary characters in cafes, on buses, in parks, in bars. Face Up was created by re-contextualising online materials as a perpetual “line of sight” and networked circulation of imagery reflecting the intimate life of the racialised diasporic figure.
I created Face Up four years prior to the prolonged protests (including Black Lives Matter) that have raised visibility of the conditions under which many black people in this country live, but the work registers the under-represented subject area of violated racialised bodies, montaging in material captured on smartphones and circulated via social media.
Face Up makes new connections and provides insights drawn from a range of disciplinary areas that involve visual culture, narrative studies, communications and social media, photography, geopolitics and migratory studies. I expand on this through ‘Her Narratives: Migration, Memory, and History’, the third and final provocation in ‘Urban Candy’, which highlights historical and continuing connections between the NHS and the Caribbean communities. “The internal monologue appearing on the screen in quick succession is soon replaced by a half-conversation, that is, hearing or rather reading on the screen Deirdre’s part of the conversation she is having with her cousin in Georgetown, Guyana, on Skype. The silent, visual, written narrative unfolds in the form of a conversation to reveal ... the commonality of the diasporic experience, familial economics and the historical trajectory of black labouring women’s bodies as integral to sustaining the public health service in the UK” (Kempadoo, 2019, p314).
| Creators | Kempadoo, R. |
|---|---|
| Description | Kempadoo’s research focused on smartphone imagery in order to reflect multicultural urban life and the experiences of the diasporised self, addressing imagery deploying smartphone aesthetics in artistic production. Overheard dialogue on |
| Portfolio items | Ghosts: Keith Piper/Roshini Kempadoo |
| Urban Candy: Screens, Selfies and Imaginings | |
| After Indenture: Three Photo Stories Roshini Kempadoo; Sharlene Khan; Wendy Nanan | |
| Year | 2015 |
| Publisher | University of Westminster |
| Web address (URL) | https://vimeo.com/376952122 |
| Keywords | CREAM Portfolio |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.34737/qq895 |
| File |