Currents 40: Widline Cadet

Currents 40: Widline Cadet marks the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and the highly anticipated full presentation of her ambitious, nearly decade-long project Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance). Rooted in photography and expanded through video, family snapshots, and installation, Cadet’s work explores Black diasporic life through her lived experience of emigrating to the United States, pushing the boundaries of contemporary image-making.

Cadet began photographing her extended family to address a scarcity of ancestral images and the physical distance from her home country. As access to her family in Haiti became increasingly limited, she turned the camera toward herself and those around her, creating what she describes as a living archive. Across the exhibition, her works consider migration, memory, and belonging through meticulous staging, autobiographical details, and visual strategies such as doubling and repetition.

Displayed in unexpected and spatially dynamic ways, Cadet’s work challenges traditional modes of photographic presentation, inviting viewers to experience images not only as documents, but as open-ended, evolving narratives that bridge absence and presence, past and present.

Presented as part of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Currents series, its platform for new ideas in contemporary art, Currents 40: Widline Cadet highlights an artist shaping today’s conversations in art and culture through innovative approaches to photography and media. Installed in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts, the exhibition builds on the Museum’s long-standing commitment to photography, video, and installation, offering audiences an immersive encounter with an influential and compelling artistic voice.