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20/4/2012

Rajkamal Kahlon

Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen

curated by Miriam Oesterreich

The Wilhelm-Hack-Museum presents the American artist Rajkamal Kahlon's exhibition Double Vision/Doppelbilder at its Project Space for Young Art, Rudolf-Scharpf-Gallery, from April 21 to July 22, 2012.
Rajkamal Kahlon works with the visual material of colonialism. Starting from ethnographic books, plates, and military strategy books from the colonial era, she appropriates, transforms, and destroys representations of the colonial Other. Recalling the relics of the viewer's history, Kahlon invites him to interrogate the very ground of his own identity. Integrating grotesque, pathologised and criminalized bodies into sanitized narratives of our histories and present reality, she opens a space for a painful but emancipating introspection. Through Kahlon's work, one is always both colonizer and colonized, powerful and powerless. Between representations of our atrocious history and its official representation, anarchistic humor shatters all beliefs in the absolute legitimacy of our own position. The fascinating beauty and unbearable horror of her paintings resonates with the transcendence of liberatory laughter.

The works in Double Vision/Doppelbilder are formally and theoretically dense. They rethink how we individually and collectively look at images, forcing a renegotiation of how we understand the art object and ourselves as privileged viewers. The exhibition presents a challenge to the limits of Cartesian Dualism. Through a reconsideration of European painting, it critiques the western philosophical privileging of disembodied vision. Intersecting this philosophical inquiry, are the colonial subjects represented in European imperial archives. The Subaltern is allowed to speak outside of the frame, unhinged and free to create new contexts of meaning. The once passive viewer now becomes the focus of the artworks themselves. Subalterns take on their own life, are animated, and appear to dominate the pictures more than the pictures dominate them. The image is created in the moment of its viewing.

Rajkamal Kahlon lives and works in Berlin. Kahlon received her MFA from the California College of Art and is a past participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan. Kahlon's painting, drawings, and performances have been exhibited internationally in museums, foundations, and galleries in Europe, North America, and Asia, including NGBK, The Queen's Museum, Bronx Museum, Oakland Museum, Apex Art, Artists Space, White Box, PPOW, and Ratio 3. Kahlon's work has been featured in publications including Art Asia Pacific, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Tageszeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. Kahlon is the past recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and the Lambent Fellowship. In 2012, Kahlon has been awarded major artist grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, the Lambent Foundation, and Goethe Institute.

Accompanying the exhibition is a new 92-page heavily illustrated hardcover book, Rajkamal Kahlon – Doppelbilder/Double Vision, published by Kerber Press, with an artist interview by Manan Ahmed, and essays by Lalitha Gopalan and Miriam Oesterreich.

Image: Native Way to Climb, 2011, Gouache und Tusche auf Giclée-Druck, 86 x 66 cm

Press contact:
Theresia Kiefer M.A. T 0621. 504-3403 E-Mail: theresia.kiefer@ludwigshafen.de

Wilhelm-Hack-Museum
Rudolf Scharpf Gallery
Berliner Strasse 23 D-67059 Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Opening hours
Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed on Monday
Admission
7 euros, reduced 5 euros
free admission for children up to 10 years of age
family ticket 15 euros

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