Rajkamal Kahlon’s practice resides at the intersection of visuality, violence, and colonial histories. Submitting historical and contemporary archives to a transformative process of deconstruction and intervention, she recuperates drawing and painting as sites of aesthetic and political resistance. Kahlon’s works do not take their starting point on a blank canvas, but appropriate a range of archival materials – anthropology and travel books, historical treatises, medical records and military reports. The artist cuts apart books and overlays the disassembled pages with contemporary imagery and poignant portraiture, thus confronting the problematic nature of the source materials. In doing so, she not only examines the lasting impacts of colonial and ethnographic narratives on contemporary society, but by radically altering the colonial images, she also allows her subjects, who have been made into curios by the books’ photographers and authors, to reassert their individuality and dignity. And even more: through the defiant gaze of their protagonists, Kahlon’s paintings address the viewers directly, asking the question from the title of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien: how are you implicated in this violence and injustice surrounding you?

Following the eponymous retrospective by Kahlon in Kunsthalle Wien in 2022, the publication Which Side Are You On? documents a selection of works from over twenty years of her practice, and features new texts by Ana Teixeira Pinto, Sergueï Spetschinsky, Susette Min and Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, as well as comprehensive interview with the artist.

The book was designed by Lana Grahek, and in line with Kahlon’s practice, it can, and is meant to be, taken apart by the readers.

Rajkamal Kahlon (b. 1974, Auburn, CA) is an American artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Kahlon received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, CA, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. She is an alumna of Skowhegan and the Whitney ISP and is a professor of painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. Kahlon has held solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Gallery Wedding, Berlin, Germany; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany; and Kunstverein Konstanz, Germany; among others.

Book launch and talk are part of the series of events called Remembering Freedom.

Program supported by:

City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb
Kultura Nova Foundation