In January and February 2016 the artist Rajkamal Kahlon stayed as artist in residence at Weltmuseum Wien. In autumn 2017 she came back to Vienna for a second time and realized an exhibition based on her research at the museum.
Read the article the artist published on the SWICH blog
Blog created by Rajkamal Kahlon during her residency: stayingwithtrouble.tumblr.com/
The US-American artist who lives in Berlin deals with questions of representation and institutional power at ethnographic museums. During her stay in January and February 2016, she researched in the archives of Weltmuseum Wien and worked on the project “Staying with Trouble: From Ethnographic Museums to Terrorist Bodies”.
The results of her research were presented in several forms: she discussed her work at an artist talk during her stay in Vienna and wrote an online blog. In addition, Kahlon created an illustrated record, mimicking the form of a colonial travel diary which documents her stay at the museum and she created a series of drawings. Using these elements as basis, Kahlon developed an exhibition which was on display for the reopening of Weltmuseum Wien in autumn 2017.
Staying with Trouble: From Ethnographic Museums to Terrorist Bodies
In her project “Staying with Trouble: From Ethnographic Museums to Terrorist Bodies”, Rajkamal Kahlon transforms archival pictures and objects from the museum to critically reflect on the museum's relationship with colonialism. Late 19th and early 20th Century representational codes for non-European bodies relied on constructions of savagery, barbarism and primitivism, transforming the displayed bodies into objects of study for the emerging field of anthropology and ethnography. Contrasted against earlier representational forms of native bodies housed in institutional archives are the contemporary representational codes of the racialized other seen in mainstream media images. The modern ‘native’ subject, still often seen in barbarous terms, as a terrorist, is armed with weapons and lethal explosive devices. Kahlon’s project studies the movement between these representational models, of passive, anonymous, and mute objects of academic study to threatening, foreign, and sinister agents of political and social violence.
The artist searches for contradictions which can be found within the walls of the museum and makes them visible. This happens both in visual and in written from, through a series of drawings, altered photographs, her travel diary and text fragments published on her blog. Her postcard-sized drawings sabotage the visual records of 19th and 20th century collectors and at the same time comment on recent socio-political developments and their representation in media.
Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist and educator based in Berlin, Germany. Kahlon's drawings, paintings and performative installations use overlapping strategies of critical aesthetics and absurdist humor to interrupt the pedagogical function of texts and images found within historical and contemporary colonial archives. Kahlon received her MFA from the California College of Art and is a past participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Her projects have been exhibited in biennials, museums and foundations in North America, Europe and Asia, including the 2012 Taipei Biennial, Meeting Points 7, Museum of Modern Art Antwerp, (MHKA), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City (MUAC), Museum of Modern Art,Warsaw, Wilhelm Hack Museum, NGBK, Queens Museum of Art, Artists' Space, White Box and Apex Art. Kahlon is the recipient of a Stiftung Kunstfonds Artist Grant, a Goethe Institute Grant, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, and a Lambent Project Grant. Kahlon is the past recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and a Lambent Artist Fellowship.
Website Rajkamal Kahlon: www.rajkamalkahlon.com
Image below: Cover of travel diary created during R.Kahlon's stay at Weltmuseum Wien: "Field Work: An Artist’s Reflection Among Her Time With the Natives of Vienna," Illustrated with Numerous Watercolors and Handwritten, 2016
