01.12. 2022 – 16.04. 2023
The work of the artist Rajkamal Kahlon often focuses on dealing with the colonial legacy. She sees a kind of “care work” in her artistic work. A service to others that consciously distances itself from the widespread reduction of painting as a luxury good and commodity and at the same time consciously undermines the mechanisms of this market.
Kahlon takes a critical look at archives, historical documents and literature of colonialism, which she overlays with drawings and painted images of people who are otherwise subject to the colonial perspective of these sources.
In this way, drawing and painting become scenes of political and aesthetic resistance; the violence inherent in colonial and ethnographic depictions is contrasted with beauty, humor and seductive sensuality.
Kahlon simultaneously redefines the positions of the earlier recipients, researchers, of these archival holdings and undermines the hierarchical relationship between enthnographers and anthropologists and the “passive” subjects of their sources of interpretation.
In the exhibition curated by Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, the Kunsthalle Wien is showing a synopsis of the works of Rajkamal Kahlo from the last 20 years, thereby making her subversive-political artistic strategies visible.
Rajkamal Kahlon
01.12. 2022 – 16.04. 2023
Wien, Kunsthalle / Museumsquartier
kunsthallewien.at/ausstellung/rajkamal-kahlon/
