Talking Back to History: Rajkamal Kahlon’s Transformations at P·P·O·W
Installation View: Rajkamal Kahlon, “Are My Hands Clean?”, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor January 10 — February 15, 2025, New York, NY 10013 Courtesy of P·P·O·W Gallery and artist
Rajkamal Kahlon's exhibition "Are My Hands Clean?" at P·P·O·W confronts the violent histories embedded in colonial and ethnographic archives, transforming them into powerful visual narratives. Through her meticulous practice, Kahlon appropriates and reimagines historical documents, photographs, and texts to critique Western knowledge production and its complicity in racial and colonial violence.
A central work in the exhibition is "People of the Earth…," a project that began during Kahlon's SWICH artist residency at the Weltmuseum Wien in 2017. During this time, she discovered a copy of the 1902 German anthropology publication Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) by Kurt Lampert in an antique bookstore. She purchased the book and began repurposing its pages as her canvas, creating a series of over 300 drawings that challenge the colonial gaze.
Installation View: Rajkamal Kahlon, “Are My Hands Clean?”, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor January 10 — February 15, 2025, New York, NY 10013 Courtesy of P·P·O·W Gallery and artist
Lampert’s book presents photographs of Black, Brown, and non-European individuals as passive anthropological subjects, available for study, ridicule, and consumption. In response, Kahlon disrupts this dynamic by imbuing these figures with agency and dignity. Some subjects are adorned in elegant suits, contemporary fashion, or striking hairstyles, reclaiming their presence from the objectifying lens of ethnography. Others wield weapons, such as a long, blood-stained knife, or have their faces wrapped in bandages, suggesting both protection and medical care. In other works, Kahlon highlights the persistence of colonial subjugation by depicting figures in bondage, underscoring that the legacies of colonial violence remain unresolved and demand continued reckoning.
Installation View: Rajkamal Kahlon, “Are My Hands Clean?”, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor January 10 — February 15, 2025, New York, NY 10013 Courtesy of P·P·O·W Gallery and artist
The first gallery in the exhibition features mixed media works on archival photo-rag paper, nearly life-sized representations of women. Overlaying enlarged photographs of anonymous women from these historical texts, Kahlon hand-colors the surfaces with fields of vibrant hues before adorning her subjects in garments and accessories inspired by histories of fashion, radical feminists, and Third World armed revolutionaries. Through this process of material and historical layering, Kahlon recuperates humanity for these unnamed women and, in doing so, "talks back"—to the original authors, to the discipline of anthropology, to Western knowledge production, and to U.S. imperial violence.
The final gallery of the exhibition features an in situ, hand-painted mural of two bare-chested women seated side by side, hovering above human scale behind one of the hand-painted portraits. Their imposing presence raises questions about scale and representation—does their larger-than-life depiction amplify the muted voices of the women represented throughout the exhibition? Kahlon's mural, like much of her work, disrupts the historical record and insists on a reconsideration of who is seen, heard, and remembered.
Installation View: Rajkamal Kahlon, “Are My Hands Clean?”, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor January 10 — February 15, 2025, New York, NY 10013 Courtesy of P·P·O·W Gallery and artist
Through such interventions, Kahlon’s "Are My Hands Clean?" lays bare the tensions between historical representation and lived experience, urging viewers to reconsider the ways in which narratives of power and oppression continue to shape our world.
For more information about this exhibition and others at P·P·O·W Gallery, please visit their website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram and Artsy.