Rajkamal Kahlon, a Berlin-based American artist, recuperates drawing and painting as sights of aesthetic and political resistance. The lingering spectre of colonialism and the aesthetics of ethnography are continually brought into focus through her use of strategies of interruption and collage. Drawing on history, archives and literature, Kahlon's research submits archival resources to a process of creative transformation that resulting in sensual, humorous, formally rigorous artworks that address the reclamation of humanity for racialized, gendered and indigenous communities targeted for destruction. In using her own hand in redrawing and repainting the bodies of "native" subjects, Kahlon allows for the rehabilitation of those bodies, histories and cultures that have been distorted, erased or maligned.
War Bill, 2010
Gouache and Acrylic on Watercolor paper. 180 x 130 cm.
Wrestlers, 2010
Acrylic and Gouache on Watercolor Paper, 130 x 180 cm
Fear of a Black Planet, 2010
Acrylic and Gouache on Watercolor Paper, 180 x 130 cm
My Temple of Justice, 2010
Acrylic and Gouache on Watercolor paper, 180 x 130
Reading Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that here, we enter ‘death-worlds, forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of living dead’. Artist Rajkamal Kahlon’s subjects inhabit just such death-worlds, standing at the nexus between epistemic and material violence. Her work often deals with the difficulty of representing the subaltern – those who didn’t make it into the proletariat after the experience of colonial dispossession, remaining instead a residue of a world undone. In a text so apt it could have been written with Kahlon’s work in mind, the postcolonial scholar David Lloyd argues in his essay ‘Representation’s Coup’ that the subaltern is ‘haunted with the spectre of violence’—not the violence done by or to the subaltern, but the violence inherent to the West’s self-representation as the universal under which every particular can be subsumed.