Widline Cadet’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in an exploration of memory. Cadet’s work, whether photography, video, or performance, often employs duplication to signify the alternations of past and present, self and other, those who leave and what remains. This image, taken from the series Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) (2017-ongoing) features a pair of girls, themselves doubled, in gingham-checkered school uniforms common throughout the Caribbean and drawn from the artist’s memory of her youth spent in Pétion-Ville, Ayiti. A landscape emerges around them, both natural and artificial, into which they disappear and simultaneously progress beyond. The pas de deux does not indicate whether they glance back or forward, whether they are arriving or departing, only that they aspire towards what is unrevealed.

This work is presented as a part of There are no parts, an exhibition curated by Letticia Cosbert Miller that brings together artists Nydia Blas, Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Michèle Pearson Clarke, who each explore the complexity of Black girlhood through photography.

Here, girlhood is understood not merely as a temporal encounter, but as a framework through which we, regardless of age and gender, are able to engage with the meanings and lives of Black girls. Girlhood is a liberatory and creative space in which one is continually being and becoming, acquiring knowledge of self, and seeking practical ways of coping with and resisting cultural constraints and expectations. From the mundane to the magnificent, Black girls are responding to representations of and attitudes towards class, gender, race, ability, and sexuality. This exhibition displays those responses–the devices, gestures, and embellishments by which Black girls manifest their ideas and create their own, new images of self.