Roshini Kempadoo is a visual artist and educator of Indian Caribbean descent. Her work is very significant because it highlights the cultural mix of the Caribbean often lost in translation to the UK. Here, we have been busy developing dominant orthodoxies that Caribbean people are mainly of African origin and that Asians are all genetically connected to the Indian subcontinent. Her work is trying to restore the complexities of Caribbean history through sometimes an autobiographical investigation.  Now that race is back on the cultural agenda, it seems to me that this is a good moment to stop and look back at her by now extensive body of work. This exhibition and catalogue mark fourteen years of practice.

The vigour with which she has pursued her commitment to making her work has resulted in a very coherent and consistent insistence on recognising the political. Her research-based methodology has led to a parallel career in higher education. What is very provocative about her work is that it offers us a complex set of relationships that we as audience not only enjoy unpicking because it is full of diffuse humour but also because it recognises complex relationships between the present and the colonial period of British expansion.

In a remarkable achievement she has managed to maintain this approach through a very difficult period in the UK where we have witnessed the collapse of what was once referred to as the independent photography movement, that network of publications and galleries, which were the vehicle for such debates. The 1990s also saw the evolution of the clearly political moment of the Black Arts movement in Britain evolve into an international aesthetic. Race and politics slipped quietly off the agenda to be replaced by the YBA phenomenon.

Where photography in Britain was once seen as a vehicle for social change, the art establishment has now absorbed it, the very establishment whose critique has been the subject of her work. She has been at the forefront of working in digital media, and just as photography is becoming acceptable to art, she has moved on to multi-media projects. We will see how long it will take the art world to catch up with this more ephemeral and interactive process.

© Sunil Gupta, OVA London 2004