By Jonathan Morales

2021年10月5日

尸检报告是临床的，科学的，合乎逻辑的。 It details the internal and external details of the man’s body, as well as the cause of death.

Alone, it would tell you little about the man himself – the photos of him and others like him who died of causes from “natural” to “undetermined” to “homicide” have not been declassified – other than the historical fact that he died while in U.S. military custody in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But Rajkamal Kahlon didn’t leave the reports alone. Through a painting technique known as “marbling,” she has given the entire document a grisly, reddish look similar to that of a microscopic view of the human body. 上面是让人想起欧洲解剖插图的水墨画。

卡隆说，和她所有的作品一样，她的目标是通过重新定位和定义殖民主义本身的工具，重新构建她所谓的殖民叙事。

“I’m trying to bring about the embodiment of these men – some kind of symbolic representation to account for and have us think about and consider who these men were and what our role is in their deaths,” Kahlon said.

The series of drawings, titled 你吻过尸体吗, is among several currently displayed in the University 图书馆 Gallery as part of Kahlon’s exhibition, “And Still I Rise,” her first solo show since 2005.

The exhibition, on display through Friday, Dec. 17, appears to suits 囊状态, which has committed itself to antiracism and being an “anchor university” for the 萨克拉门托 region, said Kelly Lindner, art galleries and collections coordinator for the College of Arts and Letters.

“My programming in general is very much geared toward elevating voices of artists of color, women, and those who are engaging in conversations that I think are at the core of what our anchor mission is and the University overall,” Lindner said.

The impact of “And Still I Rise” will not be limited to the 囊状态 campus. 与尤巴萨特艺术文化合作，卡隆将于10月8日星期五在尤巴市参加一个演讲和社区讨论。

Yuba City is home to one of the largest Sikh populations outside the Punjab state of India, and the exhibition features Kahlon’s latest body of work, 进入我燃烧的房子, which overpaints the text of white supremacist Madison Grant with portraits of victims of the 2012 mass shooting at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis.

 

Kahlon created the work featured in “And Still I Rise” between 2001 and 2021. Among the other collections are Cassel’s Illustrated History of India, 2003-2005, in which she painted over pages from a 19th-century textbook; Die Volker der Erde在一本1902年出版的德国人类学书籍中，展示了非欧洲女性的画作； and We’ve Come a Long Way Together, a series of portraits of travelers from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East painted over a popular 1940s travel book.

The exhibition also features a nine-minute film, 阿富汗人民, composed of high-resolution thermal imagery of bombing footage overlaid with photographs of Afghan men compiled for a 1960s Russian anthropological survey.

“A lot of (my) work is about restoring dignity and humanity to the original subjects, which is taken when they are turned into an object of study,” she said.

For Kahlon, the daughter of Punjabi immigrants and a native of Auburn, about 35 miles east of 萨克拉门托, art and painting in particular became a way to “reckon the reality that I was experiencing … from the reality that I was being told to experience.”

“(Painting) is a place where I can try to re-enact care, symbolic and visual care, toward representational subjects who have been erased, distorted or maligned in some fashion in terms of historical archives, colonial archives, and colonial history,” she said.

“It allows me a space to speak and have a voice, and to talk back to these histories that are very problematic.”

The exhibit’s title references a Maya Angelou poem that Kahlon said represents feminist resistance and fosters hope in the face of oppression.

“Part of what I want to do is give the students a sense of agency towards knowledge and how they can look at primary sources and come to their own conclusions, that they can be their own author,” she said.

More information about “And Still I Rise,” including a panel discussion Wednesday, Oct. 6, with Kahlon, 可以在图书馆图片库网页上找到吗.

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