Rajkamal Kahlon

Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist based in Germany whose work draws on legacies of colonialism, often using the material culture, documentary material, and aesthetics of Western colonial archives.[1]

Biography

Kahlon was raised in California, the child of Pakistani-born Sikhs from India.[2]

Kahlon holds an MFA from the California College of Art, where she was a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts, and a BA from the University of California, Davis. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program.[3]

Exhibitions

Her work has been shown internationally at the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Taipei Biennial, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and more.[3][4]

Works

She is best known for her work "Did You Kiss the Dead Body?," a series of works based on autopsy reports and death certificates of Afghan and Iraqi men who died in American military prisons abroad which she obtained through an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act request. The title for the project comes from Harold Pinter's poem "Death," which he recited upon receiving his 2005 Nobel Prize.[2] She drew bodies and body parts on each report, then marbled the papers with ink, recalling, for her, microscopic human cells, and for others, the process of waterboarding.[5][6] Kahlon's work illuminates and overlaps histories of science and medicine, imperialism, colonialism, and terror, and draws parallels between seemingly disparate moments in time and knowledge.[6] The work was created while Kahlon was an artist-in-residence at the ACLU's New York headquarters.[7]

Kahlon is one of a number of artists working with the documents and ethnographic materials related to the War on Terror, including artist Jenny Holzer and Index of the Disappeared (a collaborative project of Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani).[8][9][10]

Four of her works, including "Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks" from the "Did You Kiss the Dead Body?" series, are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp.[11][12]

Miriam Oesterreich and Reinhard Spieler edited a critical monograph entitled Double Vision to accompany her 2012 eponymous exhibition at Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie.[10]

References
  1. "MEETING POINTS 7". www.muhka.be. Archived from the original on 2021-06-14. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  2. "The Body Artist". Asian American Writers' Workshop. 2014-09-17. Archived from the original on 2020-05-17. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  3. "Rajkamal Kahlon". CCA's Graduate Program in Visual + Critical Studies. 2014-01-13. Archived from the original on 2016-01-25. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  4. "SWICH: Programme : Rajkamal Kahlon". www.swich-project.eu. Archived from the original on 2023-01-19. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  5. "Artists Share Their Personal, Tragic Experiences in Health and Care". Hyperallergic. 2016-08-05. Archived from the original on 2019-02-12. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  6. Kapadia, Ronak K. (2019). "Kissing the Dead Body: Conjuring "Warm Data" in Archives of U.S. Global Military Detention". Verge: Studies in Global Asias. 5 (1): 123–152. doi:10.5749/vergstudglobasia.5.1.0123. ISSN 2373-5058. JSTOR 10.5749/vergstudglobasia.5.1.0123. S2CID 188347656.
  7. "Slideshow: Did You Kiss the Dead Body? by Rajkamal Kahlon". American Civil Liberties Union. Archived from the original on 2021-03-29. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  8. "Making Art from the War on Terror's Deadly Paper Trail". Hyperallergic. 2015-01-08. Archived from the original on 2019-06-28. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  9. "Art as a response to U.S. global military detention". www.international.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on 2020-08-06. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  10. "Rajkamal Kahlon". KERBER VERLAG. Archived from the original on 2020-09-22. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  11. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2023-01-19. Retrieved 2020-04-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  12. https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/72-meeting-points-7-ten-thousand-wiles-and-a-hundred-thousand-tricks/artist/2047-rajkamal-kahlon/items
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