C Applewhaite

C Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker, editor, and writer. His work creates compassionate, critically intimate encounters with how ongoing histories interfere in difficult, collective experience. Working primarily with film/video, photography, and text in hybrid documentary forms, he mixes institutional archival material with his own personal biography. These works embed listening as both practice and ethic -- a method of invention. In this directed listening, he pays particular attention to the absences that dominant histories write upon his body and other stories. Born in Trinidad & Tobago, he approaches the world through a Black queer, feminist, anti-racist, and Caribbean studies framework attentive to the archipelago's centrality in the production of global capitalism, via the region's forced participation in the triangular trade of chattel slavery. Thinking with and through possibility in the face of historical and present genocidal capture, where the fullness of living appears impossible, he generates aesthetic proposals -- spanning video, writing, installation, performance, and curatorial practice -- that support the nourishment and maintenance of spiritual abolition and ancestral fulfilment: the matters of life.

Recent work includes untitle, "HANDLE WITH CARE" (2024, sculpture), exhibited in the national touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III, UK (2024-25), and I AM THE WORLD (2022), exhibited in the national screening program, Selected 16 (2026). His first film, A New England Document (2020, video), won the best emerging artist award at Mimesis Documentary Festival, USA and streamed on The Criterion Channel (USA/CA, 2022-2025). Solo presentations include transmediale, DE (2023) and DIFFUSION, CA (2024). His work has been shown in group programs and exhibitions at galleries, museums, film festivals, and sites of study in the UK, USA, Canada, and Germany. He has written for Tanya Leighton Gallery, Open City Documentary Festival, Millennium Film Journal, and Harvard Magazine. Between 2023 and 2025, he was an artist-in-residence at Somerset House Studios, London, UK.