RAJKAMAL KAHLON: ARE MY HANDS CLEAN?

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Are My Hands Clean?, Rajkamal Kahlon’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 10 - February 22, 2025

Kahlon’s artistic work builds on twenty years of extensive research into drawing and painting as sites of political resistance. Kahlon draws on legacies of imperialism, often using the material culture, documents, and aesthetics of Western colonial archives. Her artistic research, at the intersection of visuality, violence and imperial histories, has evolved to reflect on how trauma and the body are at the center of political violence.

Through her work, Kahlon addresses the studied and objectified body from within the archive. For Kahlon, painting and drawing are proposed as forms of care work, mediums of rehabilitation, that give voice to anonymous photographic subjects. Beauty, joy, and rebellious humor are yielded simultaneously as disruptive and healing strategies to violence inherent to western hegemony. In Are My Hands Clean? Kahlon brings together three bodies of work that incorporate pages ripped from controversial early 20th century German anthropological and scientific books.

Overlaying enlarged photographs of anonymous women from within these texts, Kahlon hand-colors her surfaces in 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.