The following text is a written excerpt from Rajkamal Kahlon’s lecture, Staying with Trouble, From Ethnographic Museums to Terrorist Bodies, which she gave at the Kunsthistorisches Museum on February 11, 2016 in Vienna. The lecture was part of her SWICH residency in January and February 2016 at Weltmuseum Wien.
A video of the lecture can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1G-vhS8hjw.
My project and talk refer to a question in a recent paper the author and professor of Feminism and Techno-Science, Donna Haraway posed, “What is it to write and think and act in a time of exterminations and extinctions, and what is the work of recuperation?” Her reply was “Staying with trouble.”
I’ll return to this question and speak more about my residency later, but first I’d like to talk about luck. To be lucky is to have, bring or result in good fortune or luck. Lucky in India also serves as a first name among the middle classes of Punjab together with “Happy” “Dimple” and “Lovely.”
I am lucky or so I’ve been told again and again. Maybe it has to do with being the only person in my family to be born in the U.S. Some combination of luck and fetal determination resulted in my American birth. It was that and a liberalized immigration policy in the 1960′s and ‘70′s that allowed the newly educated classes from the ”third world” to escape the limited prospects of their former colonies. Doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers streamed out of the developing world and populated the factories and fields of the U.S., my parents among them.
I think about my family having a legal route into the U.S. and that not lessening the trauma of their journey. I think about the desperation my mother faced when an unplanned pregnancy threatened the necessary paperwork for departure. After her abortion and shortly before she boarded a plane for California via Hawaii, I was conceived. Was it luck? I think about the kinds of decisions my mother faced. My family continues to bear the heavy mark of migration but I can scarcely imagine living indefinitely in transit, between borders, without adequate food or shelter, no guarantee of a future and facing a hostile, quickly closing Europe. Is it luck that I was born on the right side of a border?
I am also left thinking about the reality of Europe, the one that is rarely talked about, that appears incompatible with it’s magnificent imperial palaces, flowing silk tapestries and glittering facades. It’s a Europe, in its modern form, which only exists because of its siphon-like strangulation of the non-European world, using up its people, nature and animals much like a cannibal would suck the marrow from a bone. Europe has littered the road with carcasses. Miraculously, the half-eaten and near dead scrape their way out of American and European bombing campaigns with an intact sense of hope that Europe or the west can still be home.
There’s a knock at the door asking for help. Is it a case of Stockholm Syndrome? The victim continues to identify with the aggressor.
When I read the signs sprayed onto buildings around Vienna, “Refugees go home,” I wonder what is this home the signs refer to? What happened there that has made so many millions flee and leave everything and everyone they know just to have the chance to be treated as less than human in a foreign place?
Part of the answer might be found within the walls of the Weltmusuem Wien, formerly Museum Für Völkerkunde, in it’s history and founding, in the acquisition of its collections. The answers can also be found in the disciplines themselves of ethnography and anthropology, disciplines founded in Europe. As disciplines they helped shape a world view of the barbaric and primitive other in contrast to a materially and technologically advanced civilized western man, something that museums through their unique capacity to isolate and detach all external context of what is on display helped to further. This view continues to mark our contemporary world and shapes how we look at each other.
As an artist living in New York in September 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the aftermath of the War on Terror, an endless and perpetual war first waged by the U.S., and now also many of it’s allies, has been significant in shaping my work with colonial images, texts and archives. Generally, my work interrupts the original pedagogical function of images to reveal a subtext that is often violent. It also connects recurring motifs of imperial violence that continue to shape our lives in the present.
I’d like to read a passage of an article that appeared in the Nation, one of the few of dissent w/in the US after Sept. 11, by Chalmers Johnson titled “Blowback.”
“Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any chance of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it no targets. On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are “a beacon for freedom” and because the attackers were “evil.” In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, “This is civilization’s fight.” This attempt to define difficult- to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values–as a “clash of civilizations,” is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the “blowback” that America’s imperial projects have generated. “Blowback” is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities that have been kept secret from the American people.”
This image (see image 1) is from a series made directly after September 11th titled People and Places, Here and There: Stories of India. It was then that the logic of cutting up a 19th Century American grade school textbook on India presented itself as a way to visually address what was taking place around me politically and socially. The language and content of the 19th C illustrated children’s book and the mainstream media after 9/11, were nearly identical. Both conflated notions of progress with western civilization, democracy with free market capitalism, and both used constructions of the eastern body as barbaric and primitive while the western body is represented as civilized and rational.
Just after moving to Berlin I began a series of works called Double Take. The images (see image 2) are over 180 cm high and are watercolor paintings that use 19th C studio photography and etchings as source material to address contemporary iconic representations of war and the threat of bodily violence.
The next images (image 3 + 4) are digital reproductions I made of engravings found in the 19th Century Illustrated British newspaper, The London Graphic, that I painted over with acrylic and gouache passages. The first engraving depicts a 19th C battle scene in Afghanistan between the “fanatical Ghazis and the Royal Irish.” The other is a Pears Soap advertisement which includes the famous jingle, “This is the way we wash our hands, Wash our hands, Wash our hands, This is the way we wash our hands, With Pears’ Soap in the morning.”
Another series of works I’ve made off and on since 2009 is titled Did You Kiss the Dead Body? and works directly on top of U.S. military autopsy reports of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners that have been killed in U.S. custody (see image 5). The title of the series comes from Harold Pinter’s poem Death. Having become aware of the autopsy reports in the public domain in 2005 it took another 4 years for me to be physically and emotionally able to handle the material. It also took this long to arrive at a visual logic for this project which uses European medical illustrations drawn in ink onto marbled autopsy texts. This work tries to bring a kind of visual hypnotic seduction that a process like marbling or crosshatched drawing can bring to the underlying horror of a scientific language that reduces the murdered inmates into weights and measures.
This article originally appeared on Rajkamal Kahlon's blog:
http://stayingwithtrouble.tumblr.com/post/142254804022/anthropolgy-refugees-and-terrorism
