Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance)

Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance), the second presentation of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presents her acclaimed series exploring Black diasporic life through her family’s immigration from Haiti.

After leaving Haiti as a child, Cadet originally photographed her extended family to supplement the small number of images of her ancestors that had been passed down, counteracting both the physical separation from her home country and the loss of these relatives. But increasingly limited access to her family abroad inspired the artist to turn the camera on herself, as well as other Black women around her, creating a stand-in archive that explores absence through presence. 

Seremoni Disparisyon addresses shared themes of immigration, including loss, aspiration, and memory, through the specificity of Cadet’s experiences. Many works contain concrete autobiographical details: family photographs and videos, personal belongings like the curtains her mother brought from Haiti, and Kreyòl titles drawn from actual conversations. Others stretch across distance and memory, like the photograph of a model in a gingham dress, a re-creation of the artist’s childhood school uniform. Although displaced from her original home, Cadet nevertheless finds echoes of it everywhere, such as the breeze-block architecture and bougainvillea flowers of her current residence, Los Angeles. This doubling recurs throughout Seremoni Disparisyon—building a dreamlike, proxy world inhabited by elements both real and imagined, experienced and missed.

This exhibition includes work from across the entire series, bringing together photographs, installation, and video to encompass the breadth of Cadet’s imagemaking practice and capacious approach to photography, including vinyl application, photo-sculpture hybrids, and multimedia presentations.