The archive and the repertoire in Roshini Kempadoo’s Ghosting

This essay highlights the role of archives, archival research, and integration of archival records in contemporary Caribbean visual artwork that evokes and reimagines unevenly recorded historical processes/moments. It also suggests the defining role of this approach to contemporary visual artwork is the perspective of Caribbean women artists. Through a discussion of Roshini Kempadoo’s interactive installation Ghosting, the essay considers alternative forms of archiving lived memory through Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire. It also considers modernist and postmodernist techniques of recontextualization, such as montage, in Caribbean contemporary art (and specifically in Kempadoo’s Ghosting), from a postcolonial and creolized context.