Rajkamal Kahlon, You Can't Kill Us, We're Already Dead, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 36 5/8 x 75 1/4 ins.
In conjunction with the final day of Rajkamal Kahlon's Are My Hands Clean?, artist and writer Molly Crabapple will host a tour of the exhibition followed by a Q & A.
Kahlon’s artistic work builds on twenty years of extensive research into drawing and painting as sites of political resistance. 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.
Join us at 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor, on Saturday, February 15, 3pm, for a tour of the exhibition, in which Crabapple with be responding to selected works as well as the literary references used by Kahlon. The tour will be followed by a Q & A.
No RSVP necessary.
Molly Crabapple. Photo by Daniel Efram.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Toulouse Lautrec, Diego Rivera, and Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War.’ She is the co-author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a NY Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, a winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022, and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2023. She has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, São Paulo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University and the New York Historical Society.