Keisha Scarville: lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound

Keisha Scarville has spent much of her life tracing routes of movement between the Caribbean and America in order to investigate her own lineage. Attempting to understand how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured, her image-making practice visualises the latent narratives inscribed within the thresholds of memory across generations.

This first publication by Scarville unfolds as a sprawling, hypnotic visual essay, evocatively interweaving the artist’s striking black-and-white photography with archival imagery, passages from books, collages, personal texts, and film stills. Moving between practice and archive, Scarville uses the form of the artist’s book to reflect on what it means to create new genealogies by disrupting conventional, linear histories. The result is a journey through a multiplicity of personal and historical narratives of the Black diaspora. With this book, Scarville reflects on a process of becoming shaped by the diasporic imagination of Black people throughout the world.

Accompanied by a text by poet and author Harmony Holiday