Keisha Scarville & Nigel Westmaas: 'Passports' [Talk]

Join us on Thursday 18 June to celebrate Keisha Scarville’s new book Passports, an intimate collection of work centered around an early passport photograph of the artist’s father.

For the launch, Scarville will be joined in conversation by Nigel Westmaas, Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College.

FREE RSVP

Thursday 18 June
19:00

CARA
225 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
United States

More about Passports 

Passports presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken from an ongoing series centred around her father’s earliest passport photograph. The artist has reinterpreted the photograph over three hundred times to date, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery – paints, beads, photograph fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf, glitter – to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. Interwoven with the passport works are archival images taken between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York City, where her father settled in the US, his self-portraits, Scarville’s own photographs of him and of Guyana’s striking landscape, and short transcripts of their conversations. Together these works excavate untold histories and disrupt the false neutrality of the passport image in an interrogation of citizenship and personhood, absence and materiality. 

Can't make it? Order a copy here.