Che Applewhaite

Che Applewhaite is a filmmaker, artist, and writer from London, UK and San Juan, Trinidad & Tobago.

Che Applewhaite is an artist and writer. He facilitates kind and critical engagement with how ongoing histories interfere with intimate, difficult, and collective experiences. He works primarily with video, photography, and written text in hybrid documentary forms.  These works embed listening as both practice and ethic of invention, embracing the pain of change and honesty that Baldwin taught us loving ourselves and each other requires.

Recent work includes A New England Document (2020) which was streaming on The Criterion Channel (USA/Canada) until April 2025. Solo presentations include transmediale, DE (2023). Selected group exhibitions include Cubitt Gallery, UK (2021), National Gallery of Art, USA (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2022). Selected screenings include Sheffield Doc/Fest, UK (2020), Prismatic Ground Festival, USA (2021), Aesthetica Film Festival, UK (2023) and the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK (2021, 2023), among others. He is an artist member of Canyon Cinema (USA). He has written for Open City Documentary Festival, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Millennium Film Journal, and Harvard Magazine.

During the residency, Che will be developing a number of projects. The main project, Drone Life, a series of new media artworks that facilitate the wanderings of an auto-fictional persona, “R.P.J.”, across different forms that remake the grammars of networking imaged technologies. Departing from experiences of solidarity and grief he experienced in his birth country of Trinidad & Tobago, and first arriving as a lecture-performance at transmediale in Berlin, the series writes around the silences of photography and archival material to trace colonial intimacies that overlap and surface, in text and image fragments, sourced across 5 continents.

Filmography

2019 - IN LOVING MEMORY, 2020 - A New England Document, 2020 - let me breathe, 2022 - I AM THE WORLD