Tidal Imprints

Tidal Imprints brings together the lens-based work of Melissa Alcena (The Bahamas) and Cédrine Scheidig (Martinique), two artists navigating the thresholds of personal history and collective memory. Both engage with spaces shaped by colonisation and creolisation—contexts where identities are continually forming, blending, and transforming. Their work resists the Caribbean’s reductive image as paradise, instead revealing the layered realities of island life: intimate, ancestral, and deeply human.

Moving fluidly between the Caribbean, Europe, and urban diasporic spaces, Alcena and Scheidig capture what often goes unseen—the quiet resistance of a stare, the rhythm of return, the poetry in a shoreline or cracked tile. Their photographs blur geographic boundaries, evoking a shared experience of displacement, inheritance, and belonging. Together, their images create a dialogue that moves beyond borders, offering a vision of Afro-Caribbean contemporary life that is hybrid, tender, and uncompromisingly real.

About the artists

Melissa Alcena
The Bahamas

Melissa Alcena is a New York and Bahamas-based photographer whose work is celebrated for her intimate and evocative portrayal of her subjects. Originally from The Bahamas, Melissa has a keen eye for capturing the depth and complexity of human experience, with images that transcend their environments and offer powerful narratives that resonate on a universal level.  

Alcena completed an applied photography course at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada in 2012. Four years later, she moved back home to The Bahamas, where her practice developed into highlighting individuality and subsequently shifting the Caribbean narrative. 

For her Caribbean-made images, Alcena’s practice is the lens through which she reintroduces herself to the landscape, documenting people in situ, expanding the visual tropes often exported from the Caribbean. Stylistically, Alcena grounds the image in chiaroscuro while balancing the natural colors of the terrain. Often in conversation with her subjects, Alcena’s photographs are a testament to kinship and an ode to landscape. Her ability to blend documentary and conceptual styles has earned her a distinguished clientele, including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Vogue China, Nike, Estée Lauder, and The Wall Street Journal. 

She has exhibited at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas several times (solo and group shows) and most recently had a solo exhibition at TERN Gallery in Nassau. 

Cédrine Scheidig
Martinique

Cédrine Scheidig is a photographer of French-Caribbean heritage living and working between Paris and the Caribbean. Her work is an exploration of Caribbean imaginaries that transcend geographic borders, offering a vision of identity as a continuous act of becoming. Driven by a poetic and critical lens that seeks to move beyond the boundaries of traditional documentary, she examines the intricate and sometimes contradictory ways in which youths reimagine both themselves and their communities in an era shaped by postcolonial and neoliberal realities. 

Her work has been presented in several group exhibitions, including Fotografia Europea Festival (2023, Italy), Rencontres de Guyane (2023, Guyane), Encontros da Imagem (2023, Portugal), Plat(t)form Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022, Switzerland), Dior Prize w/ LUMA Foundation (2021, Arles), Rencontres internationales de la photographie (2021, Arles) and in a debut solo exhibition at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, in February 2023r. She has been nominated among the British Journal Photography “Ones to Watch” (2022, UK). She was the recipient of the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents in 2021 and the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant in 2023.