Rajkamal Kahlon
From Provisions
Questions for the Artist
Provisions Library: What early memories or experiences motivated your engagement with social change?
Rajkamal Kahlon: In the same moment there is not one experience and then there is every experience I have ever had. I don't think I make work specifically about social change. To answer this question implies having an agenda, a predetermined destination. This is exactly what I am trying to move away from in my creative process and artistic practice. Every experience I've had informs my conceptual and emotional responses to imbalances of power and their translation into a reinterpretation of historical narratives through pattern, decoration, a maximalist aesthetic, distortion and the grotesque. I think we all make work informed by our subject positions. These positions include our lived and/or perceived gender, racial and class designations. While I have a deep desire to be outside of these designations and their influences, I recognize how much they inform my view of the world and social relationships and then subsequently my work as an artist. I try to keep boundaries between various disciplines fluid within my mind. Art, History, Labor, Media, Pop Culture, Museums, Shopping Malls, War, Internet, they exist within the same cultural field for me.
PL: Who are key influences in your life and why?
RK: The good, the bad and the ugly:
Kiarostami. I am fascinated by his use of representational conventions that destabilize the viewer's traditional ability to read a film. He tests filmic and diologic conventions in such a way that a fictional film reads like a documentary or candid viewing of a subject. The viewer is often left second guessing themselves and placed in a position of not knowing what they are looking at. I am deeply interested in this interruption of passivity.
Octavia Butler and Tom Stoppard. I am influenced by them both for opposite reasons. I am drawn by Stoppard's ability to create satisfying self-reflexive narratives. With Butler I am consistently amazed by her ability to transform the limits of a genre like science fiction but also to rethink the boundaries of how we perceive identities.
Harold Pinter. His use and portrayal of banal language hiding sinister intent completely turns me on and leaves me feeling ill at the same time. He is able to create individual interactions that betray larger social inequities. You can be a monster underneath all of the polite small talk, which at a certain point turns into a kind of automatic, unconscious regulated form of speech.
Adrian Piper. Just plain brilliant. Her performances pull the rug out from white America's often unspoken sense of racial and cultural superiority.
Arundhati Roy. I appreciate Roy's tenacity to not give up ground on any front, as an artist or as an activist. She does not believe one precludes the other.
James Baldwin. I can read almost any passage of Baldwin's writings and have an image ready to paint. He stimulates my imagination and emotional responses to the human possibilities of love and hate in the midst of oppression.
Vandana Shiva. I read her books and wanted to abandon art for a life of science. In the end I didn't. But I love her ability to isolate the underlying philosophy behind the cultural mindset of colonization when it moves beyond bodies and governments and into the biological sphere. She's a hero.
Robert Crumb. When I first saw Robert Crumb's work I thought I'd found a kindred spirit. His work often gets viewed as misogynistic and offensive but I see him as an artist who is allowing himself the room to explore everything that is inside of his psyche, the good, the bad and the ugly. If you cross Crumb with Frida Kahlo, the resulting love child might be my work.
PL: What books, artworks, films, music, etc. have been essential to you?
RK: Absurdism, Absurdist Theater, Mondo Cinema, 1970s and 80s American horror films, "Close-Up" Kiarostami
PL: What are you working on now?
RK: I have three projects I am working on that involve Painting, Performance/Video and Animation.
I am working on paintings made directly onto an American 19th Century Gynecological Surgery text. I am also collaborating with Berlin-based architect Olaf Pfiefer in creating modern examining tables based on their 19th Century counterparts illustrated in the text.
I am collaborating on an animation project with the cultural critic and cyber theorist David Goldberg. Using much of the iconic landscape I created in my work with Cassell's, we are working on a "living" or self generating animation that produces it's own narrative sequences.
I am also working on three short videos that revolve around the the body framed by the absurd, fantasy and pornography.
PL: How has the art world reacted to the content of your work? Do you feel that your work has been depoliticized/overpoliticized/exoticized/misinterpreted?
RK: I think my work is constantly overpoliticized. It's been summarized by some as being "too political, too controversial and too sexual." I've never thought of my work as being political. It's a label that keeps following me around. I think when we attach the term "political" to an artwork, there is a tendency to stop thinking about the work in a comprehensive way and we reduce it's ability to communicate on multiple registers.
About the Artist
"Instead of borrowing a page from history (as politicians too often do), she has torn entire pages out of a history book and painted right over them. Underneath her surreal images of unraveling children, eviscerated landscapes and captive colonials, we glimpse fragments of text, telling the tale of a misguided country that sent the military in to protect a company's investment. Though this story may seem ripped from today's headlines, it's actually cannibalized from Cassell's 19th-century Illustrated History of India under British colonial rule. Kahlon weaves a military strategist's account of "The Afghan Campaign" into a more meaningful parable of military occupation: Men appear to be inextricably entangled in ropes in an illustration captioned "Pirates of the Persian Gulf," a colonial figurehead seems about to be engulfed by a moneybag and even the tiny orange flowers tentatively springing up around him appear bloodshot. At the center of it all is a bandaged head that is a recurring feature in Kahlon's works, reminding us of mummies disinterred from their final resting places to become colonial curios and star attractions in foreign museums. But Kahlon's mummy hasn't yet given up the ghost, and returns our gaze with a wary eye. This wounded but watchful head appears in another piece, painted over Cassell's account of "The Return of Warren Hastings to England." Kahlon contrasts this tale of colonial adventures with illustrations that purport to show native customs, but she has taken Cassell's drawing of a fakir and imprisoned him in a birdcage and converted "A European Residence in Calcutta" into a boat adrift at sea... it's a tremendous catharsis when Kahlon obliterates these appalling words with poignant images that fundamentally alter the text and subtext of history."
--Alison Bing, special to SF Gate.com
More Postcolonialism in India
Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature
The Postcolonial Web is a project funded by the University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore.
Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India
This project has been funded by a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities in 1991–1992, a fellowship in the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society in the spring of 1994, and by two pretenure faculty-development awards from the University of California, Riverside.
