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Page 1

DID YOU KISS THE DEAD BODY

COLORING GERMANY

DOUBLE TAKE

Coloring Germany is an installation of paintings and altered coloring book pages selected from a contemporary coloring book produced by the German embassy for American children. Employing the graphic visual language of the coloring book, Coloring Germany interrupts essentialized notions of the German body and landscape. Using strategies of irony and humor, the project deflates ideas of German purity, insisting on difference within the contruction of German identites.
Double Take is an ongoing series which reproduces 19th and 20th Century European media images depicting South Asia and other colonial territories. The reproductions through large scale watercolor paintings and digital printing are altered so that the original pedagogical function of the imagery is transformed. The result is a dialogue between past and present geo-political ambitions.The images are sourced from engravings found in llustrated newspapers and ethnographic or studio photography.
Death Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body -Harold Pinter

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AKTION WITH A MALE BODY: NOTES

FROM SCHWARZKOGLER TO SHAHZADA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLAGELLATION

DUMMYBOARDS

Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada performed at Artist Space in 2008 marked my first public multi-media performance and continues my explorations of the transformed and grotesque body within historical moments of crisis. The multi-media piece moves between post-war Austria of the 1960's and our contemporary moment of war, offering a new way of looking at Rudolph Schwarzkogler's work, while reflecting on the impact of technologies on our present individual and collective bodies. Considering that war can now be created and watched from a vast distance, Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada addresses a collapse of this distance and attempts a recovery of the bodies we have separated ourselves from. An audio component features the voice of Shahzada, a former Guantanamo detainee and tribal elder from Afghanistan known through the camp for his sad and beautiful singing voice. The songs are based on lines of poetry smuggled to him by fellow inmates.Schwarzkogler, a member of the Vienna Actionists, began his career as a painter and went on to create largely private performances using himself, a model and a photographer. The results were simple, disturbing and austere photographic images of the body injured, healing and in the process of being handled and manipulated. Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada makes reference to the frame as a device that links painting to performance, image to the real and the past to present.
Dummy Boards," also known as "Silent Companions" began with the Dutch Trompe l'oiel tradition of tricking the viewer with the presentation of illusionistic space. This was sometimes achieved on panels created in the shape of the figure or object being painted. Dummy boards were often of servants and were placed in domestic settings such as drawing rooms or in front of fireplaces. Part of their function was to trick the visitor into thinking someone was standing in the shadows of a room.Taking dummy boards, which have mutated into a vernacular painting form, I am changing them again, in scale and purpose so that they recast the role played by the "servant," or colonial subject in relation to power and history. My dummy boards, or 3-dimensional paintings have fronts, sides and backs and extend the boundaries and relationship between painting and sculpture and use the genre of ethnographic/ colonial photography and contemporary media images as source material. The work's form simultaneously presents and negates illusion as the viewer moves toward and away from it's center.As with past projects, I am interested in examining the ideological positions within the production and distribution of images as they connect to historical and contemporary regimes of power.

Page 3

CASSELL'S ILLUSTRATED

HISTORY OF INDIA

MEASURED BONDAGE

PEOPLE AND PLACES

VIEWING PROJECT

Measured Bondage used the illustrations and texts found in a 19th C gynecological surgical text written for rural American doctors by Dresden born, Paul Munde. The book pages were incorporated into a small series of paintings and an examining table was recreated with the assistance of Berlin architect Olaf Pfeiffer.Measured Bondage was created while I was an artist in residence at arttranponder in Berlin, Germany. The five week residency culminated in an exhibiition titile trabslated as Measured Bondage: Science and Sasism under the Magnifying Glass.German text below:Während ihres Aufenthalts in Berlin dekonstruiert Kahlon einen 1880 erschienen illustrierten Text über gynäkologische Chirurgie. Sie nimmt den Text des 1807 in Dresden geborenen Arztes Paul Munde auseinander und malt auf die Seiten eine Serie intimer Bilderkommentare, welche die Beziehung zwischen Medizin und Sadismus, Gender und Autorität unter die Lupe nehmen.Zum Schluss des Aufenthaltsstipendiums zeigt eine Ausstellung im Projektraum des arttransponder, unter der breit angelegten interdisziplinären Rubrik "Kunst und Biomedizin" die Resultate von Kahlons Projekt.In Kooperation mit Olaf Pfeifer wird die Ausstellung den, von Kahlon in Auftrag gegebenen Nachbau eines viktorianischen Untersuchungstisches zeigen.Die Besucher werden eingeladen, sich darauf festschnallen und fixieren zu lassen, um David Cronenbergs Film "Die Unzertrennlichen" ( Dead Ringers) zu sehen. Der Film handelt von der, sich auflösenden Beziehung zweier Gynäkologen und Zwillingsbrüder, die in einer Fertilitätsklinik praktizieren und ist in den frühen 80er Jahren situiert.
Kahlons gouache paintings overlay 19th century book leaves featuring texts and images. Revisiting the original pedagogical function of imagery in religious texts- schooling the illeterates in the scriptures- or the tutorial rationale of images in pornographic texts, she underscores the uneven access to the means of representation in books and images, and even the high levels of illiteracy, enforced by colonial regimes. Removed from their codicils, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and similar works highlight how India was depicted in texts from the perspective of the colonizer, who self-aggrandizingly couched the often sexualized facts of domination in a patronizing rhetoric of universal betterment. Kahlons work recalls Pierre Bourdieus query on the nature of reading: Can one read anything at all without wondering what it is that reading means, without asking what are the social conditions of the possibility of reading?Eva Diaz, The Book as Object as Performance, 2004
Cassells Illustrated History of India, c. 1875, involves the hyperbolization of the contents and form of the book, which in its original state consisted of two leather-bound volumes, 1200 pages and 600 illustrations. I purchased the text at a Sothebys auction for $400 with the intention of unbinding the book, stripping it of its then current material value as a cultural object and starting a project that documented my response to the book in the form of drawings and paintings made directly onto its dislocated pages. The book is no longer allowed to serve its original productive function. It now serves itself, in content and form, to my revisions, additions and alterations, which use the motif of the grotesque body and its constituent parts to connect to larger social and political processes. These processes are visualized through the productive and consumptive functions of the body, urination, defecation, lactation, swallowing, eating, drinking. The mouth, the breast, the vagina and the anus constitute the symbolic and literal thresholds or boundaries of the inner and outer, the points of penetration, what is hidden and what is visible.
In this project I constructed 2 eight-foot oil paintings on panels of colonial Indian and European subjects posing in 19th C photographs from the British Librarys Ethnographic Archives. I cut out the faces of the original subjects, turned the paintings backs to the viewers, and faced the fronts toward mirrors hanging opposite. In order for the viewers to see the paintings completed, the piece necessitated the viewers bodily participation within it. I was interested in complicity, guilt, and denying the viewer an essentialized historical subject. The completion of the piece was contingent on the viewers occupation of anothers identity and the momentary collapse of time, space and history. The hierarchical relationship of the privileged viewer to view the traditionally passive art object serves as a metaphor for the power dynamics of colonizer and colonized.

doubletake2011

D O U B L E T A K E 2011

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Shadow of the Furure
Detail
Detail
Charges and Allegations
This is How We Wash Our Hands
Native Climbing
Imperial War Bill
Alice in Wonderland
My Temple of Justce
Fear of a Black Planet
A Brief History of Afghanistan
And Then There Was One
The Kama Sutra of Adam Smith

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C O L O R I N G G E R M A N Y

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Deutschland
Famous Vacation Town
First Day of School
Germany's Favorite Sport
A Ship in Hamburg
Flying to Germany
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DIDYOUKISSTHEDEADBODY

D I D Y O U K I S S T H E D E A D B O D Y

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Did you Kiss the Dead Body is an ongoing progject which makes reference to the last line of Harold Pinters poem Death, read by Pinter during his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a speech marked by deep criticism of American foreign policy, and the nature of truth, language and power. Did You Kiss the Dead Body grows out of a four year reection on the nature and social implication of autopsy reports and death certicates emerging from U.S. military bases and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, rst made public on the ACLUs website in2004 under the Freedom of Information Act. The texts highlight relations of abuse and power through descriptions of anonymous Iraqi and Afghan male prisoners, young and old, that have died in U.S. custody. The reports employ a rational scientic language cataloguing the internal and external details of the men's bodies while attempting to determine a cause of death, ranging from "natural" to "undetermined" to suicide." Did You Kiss the Dead Body is a conceptually linked series of works comprised of ink anatomical drawings on marbled autopsy texts, sculptures which draw on the tradition of medical wax castings of the body and a series of site specic installations which combine elements of sound, painted sculptural fragments, and found objects. Marbling, with its origins in Iran and Turkey, is employed in the context of this project as a visual referent to the internal body. The European anatomical illustrations provide a second and simultaneous view of the inner and outer body and create another circuit of meaning that is endlessly looped between the text and the image.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLAGELLATION

A B R I E F H I S T O R Y O F F L A G E L L A T I O N

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DUMMYBOARDS

D U M M Y B O A R D S

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Dummyboard No. 1

Dummyboard No. 2

Med-com 22

Detail

MEASURED BONDAGE

M E A S U R E D B O N D A G E

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AKTION

AKTION WITH A MALE BODY: NOTES FROM SCHWARZKOGLER TO SHAZAHDA

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Aktion With a Male Body: Notes From Schwarzkogler to Shahzada

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Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada

CASSELLS

C A S S E L L ' S I L L U S T R A T E D H I S T O R Y O F I N D I A

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It All Started With Someone's Lie

Give Em The Ol Razzle Dazzle

Miss Universe

Beauty and the Gonds

Indian Buddhism

Untitled

Rosebud

The End

Algebra of Infinite Justice

Fear UpHarsh Fear Up Mild

Bound Unbound

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Disciplinary Punishment

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Mr. Backlash

Untitled

Untitled

POW!

Sorry No English

Invisible Man

The Impossibility of Reading

You Said it Wouldn't Hurt

Bang!

Ancient Indian Rope Trick.

Untitled

Negotiations for Peace

Self-Portrait of the Artist

BOO!

Grey Skies Are Gonna Clear Up

Strangers in the Night

PEOPLE AND PLACES

PEOPLE AND PLACES HERE AND THERE: STORIES OF INDIA 2001-2003

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T H E V I E W I N G P R O J E C T 2001

CV EDUCATION2001 Whitney Independent Study Program1999 M.F.A., California College of the Arts1998 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture1996 University of California, DavisAWARDS2007 Lambent Fellowship in the Arts2006 Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture AwardRESIDENCIES and Fellowships2008 Emerging Artist Fellowship, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY2007 AIR, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara, CA2007 AIR, Blue Mountain Center, NY2007 Center for Book Arts Residency, NY2006 AIR, arttransponder, Berlin, Germany2005 John Michael Kohler Art Center Residency, WI2004 Fine Arts Work Center, MA2003 Jamaica Center Workspace, NY1998 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MESOLO EXHIBITIONS (selected)2009 Did You Kiss the Dead Body?, Catalyst Project Room, Berlin, DE2006 Vermessenes Fesseln: Medizin und Sadismus unter der Lupe, arttransponder,Berlin, DE2005 Unbound, P.P.O.W., New York, NY 2005 India Unbound, Provisions Library, Washington D.C. 2004 Executions, Jamaica Center Workspace Artist, Jamaica Center for Arts, Jamaica, NY2004 Imports and Exports, Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2004 An Indian Fable, Kathleen Cullen Fine Art, New York, NYGROUP EXHIBITIONS (Selected)2011 Making Mirrors, NGBK, Berlin2011 Aesthetic Justice, Lambent Foundation, New York2011 Land of Absence, New Dehli, Cochin, and Amsterdam2010 Anxieties of the Periphery, Kochi, India2010 An American Orifice, arttransponder, Berlin, (catalogue)2010 Dark Matter, Corridor Gallery, NYC2009 Augmented Flaws, Kunstagenten Gallery, Berlin2009 Oscillograms, 2B Gallery sponsored by Goethe Institute, Budapest, Hungary 2009 Wonder what the Other is up to?, Gallery OED, Kochi, India2008 Shifted focus, Kearney Street Workshop, San Francisco2008 EAF Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York 2008 Salad Days III, Artists Space, New York2008 Ethnographies of the Future, Rotunda Gallery, New York2008 Exploded Lotus, Hollywood Center for Contemporary Art, Hollywood, FL2007 Artists of Invention, Oakland Museum, California (catalogue)2007 The Big Picture, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York2007 Sultanas Dream, Exit Art, New York2007 Sufferation, thirtyninehotel, Honolulu, Hawaii2007 Tropicalisms: Subversions of Paradise, Jersey City Museum, Newark, New Jersey,2006 Anti-Handshake: Contemporary Work, Untimely Gestures, Thirtyninehotel, Honolulu2005 51st Venice Biennial, Poles Apart Poles Together, Venice, Italy, public art project2005 Post -Production Dialogue, Arttransponder, Berlin, Germany (catalogue)2005 Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY2004 Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Durham, NC,(catalogue)2004 Bush-Whack! George Adams Gallery, New York, NY2004 The Book as Object and Performance, Gigantic Art Space, New York, NY, (catalogue)2003 BQE, White Box Gallery, New York, NY2003 Reality/Fiction, Jamaica Center, NY2003 637 Running Feet: Black on White Wall Drawings, QMA, NY2002 AIM 22, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, (catalogue)2002 Unjustified, Apex Art, New York, NYPRESS/BIBLIOGRAPHYBucholz, Elke Linda.Wann haben Sie bemerkt, dass Sie weiss sind. Der Tagesspiegel. (July 5, 2011)Van Gelder, Hilde. Aesthetic Justice. Jeu de paume. (May 30, 2011)Rajkamal Kahlon. Did You Kiss the Dead Body. Red Pepper. (December-January 2010 Issue)Rajkamal Kahlon. Double Consciousness: Painting and Performing the Racial Grotesque. Critical Whiteness/ Perspectives of Color lecture series, NGBK and Metanationale, 2010Manmadhan, Prema. Caught Between Two Cultures. The Hindu (April 27, 2009)Surekha, K., A Question of Identity. Express Buzz (April 25, 2009)Tannenbaum, Joel. Pair Hack, Reassemble Colonial Legacy. The Honolulu Advertiser. (Sunday, August 5, 2006): D5Cotter, Holland. Book as Object and Performance. New York Times. (January 13, 2005)Poor, Kristin. Deconstruction Time: Rajkamal Kahlons DIY Chic. Art Asia Pacific. (February 2005): 96Micchelli, Thomas. Book as Object and Performance. Brooklyn Rail. (February 2005)McQuaid, Cate. Energetic Fellows. The Boston Globe. (February 11, 2005): D18Bing, Allison. Rajkamal Kahlon: Imports and Exports. SFGate. Art in Review (June 2004)Queens Courier: Executing the Cultural Narrative. (March 25, 2004): 8Joiner, Brian. Deconstructing Orientalism: Kahlons Executions at JCAL.Queens Chronicle (January 29, 2004): 36Datta, Jyotirmoy. Kahlon Shows Years Work Created During JCAL Residency McGowen, Carl. Turning Walls Into Art At Queens Museum. Newsday NYC. (January 12, 2003): 37 The New Yorker: Bronx Museum of the Arts (September 16, 2002): 16Cotter, Holland. Mango The New York Times. (July 19, 2002): 26 Cotter, Holland. A.I.M. 22. The New York Times. (September 13, 2002):18(January 12, 2003): 37 News India: 637 Running Feet: Black On White Wall Drawings By 14 Artists (December 27, 2002): 24News India: 637 Running Feet: Black On White Wall Drawings By 14 Artists(December 27, 2002): 24Yablonski, Linda. Unjustified. Time Out. Issue No. 333 (February 14-21, 2002):61Everything Magazine: People and Places Here and There: Stories of IndiaProject. Issue No. 3.4 (June 2002): 100-103 LECTURES AND PANELS2011 Aesthetic Justice, Lambent Foundation, New York2010 You Make it Hurt so Good: Re-Membering Muslim Bodies, Visual and Critical Studies,CCA, California2009 You Make it Hurt so Good: Re-Membering Muslim Bodies , Bauhaus University,Weimar, Germany2009 Double Consciousness: Painting and Performing the Racial Grotesque, NGBK 2008 Double Consciousness: Painting and Performing the Racial Grotesque, CCAGraduate Lecture Series2007 NAMAC, Next Generation Artists, Panel: Theresa Riley, Wendy Levy, Jazmin Jones2007 Love and Nausea: The Emotional Side-Effects of Time Travel, Spring Art Colloquia, University of California, Santa Barbara2007 Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara2006 Rajkamal Kahlon, Catalyst, Berlin, Germany2005 India Unbound Symposium, Provisions Library, Participants: Debra Diamond, Smithsonian and Fred Bohrer, Hood College2004Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, NY, Artist Talk, Moderator: Joyce Kozloff2002 Talwar Gallery, Artist Panel, NY2002 American Museum of Natural History, In Between The Lines: Reference and Context in Contemporary Art, New York, NY, Artists: Paul Pfeiffer, Ayreen Anastas, Lana Lin, Moderated: Moukhtar KokacheTEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE2010 Lecturer, University of California, BerkeleyAdjunct Senior Lecturer in the departments of PaintingCourse: Art 102, upper division undergraduate painting course with an emphasis on material and conceptual exploration.2010 Senior Lecturer, California College of Art Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the departments of Painting and Drawing and Visual and Critical Studies. Courses: Painting 1 in Painting and Drawing Department; an introductory materials based class for first year undergraduates.Points of Penetration: The Grotesque Body and Humor in Contemporary Art, in Visual and Critical Studies, an interdisciplinary seminar on representations of humor, alterity and power through the lens of grotesque body in artistic strategies.2009 Senior Lecturer, San Francisco Art Institute and California College of ArtAdjunct Senior Lecturer in the departments of Graduate Fine Arts(CCA) and Exhibitions and Museum Studies Departments (SFAI).Courses: You Said It Wouldnt Hurt: Perspectives on the Body and Trauma in Contemporary Art, an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in the department of Graduate Fine Arts at CCA that explores contemporary artistic strategies in relation to theories of phenomenology, perception, memory, social and historical trauma and constructions of the body. The Contingency of Culture: Art, Politics and Possibility in Exhibition and Museum Studies at SFAI, designed as a foundation graduate course on the history and legacy of museums and exhibitions framed within the overlapping spheres of imperialism, modernity and globalization.2008 Senior Lecturer, California College of Art Semester-long visiting artist position in the departments of Painting and Drawing and Graduate Fine Arts.Courses: Painting 2, a lower division intermediate painting course that was designed thematically around the idea of the representation and centrality of the body in painting with an emphasis on both conceptual and material processes.Senior Projects, an upper division course for seniors preparing them for exiting the institution with an emphasis on studio critiques and graduate school preparation.Points of Penetration: The Grotesque Body and Humor in Contemporary Art in the Graduate Fine Arts Department, taught as a lecture and studio based seminar. 2007 Artist in Residence, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara Residency involving a series of on-campus lectures, critiques with graduate students in the Art Department and Film & Media Studies and the digitization of Cassells Illustrated History of India Project

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