Nataša Ilić The title of the exhibition, »Are my hands clean?”, comes from a song of the same title by »Sweet Honey in the Rock«, an African American women’s choir founded in 1973, which continues to sing and make music about African American history and social justice. Why was it important to you to make a connection to this song?

Rajkamal Kahlon Over the past few years I’ve been increasingly influenced by both their music and political philosophy. Some of my recent projects, »Do You Know Our Names?« and »We’ve Come a Long Way to be Together«, have been inspired by their lyrics. Referencing their songs is also a way to gesture towards the centrality of my diasporic identity as South Asian American. Born in the U.S., I was formed by American histories of settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. From this standpoint, I was then able to connect how US imperialism informed other global histories of colonization. Artistically and intellectually my work resonates with and draws on Black diasporic figures such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, W. E. B DuBois, James Baldwin, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Their work on the universal experiences of racism under systems of colonial repression, speak directly to my own experience. To call attention to »Sweet Honey in the Rock« through referencing their titles is an homage to them and a way to find a poetic, political stance that fits the work I am doing now. »Sweet Honey« sings about oppression and liberation from the perspective of an African American experience, but this is also connected to anti-colonial struggles that span from Allende to Stephen Biko. When I wrote to suggest the title, it was an impulse. I was listening to the song in the studio while I worked and was struck by the lyrics. It’s a beautiful song about American economic imperialism, the exploitation of third world resources and women’s labor, as well as our material benefit from that exploitation. I guess it’s that quality of locating how we are each implicated into exchanges of violence, historically and in the present that I think about in my work. I do it with the visual. How is power embedded in the images we create and consume? How do these images effect how we see ourselves and others? Can this be interrupted? Recently I have come to think that the photographic and textual traces of people I encounter in colonial archives, are in fact still alive and are asking something from us. I’ve come to think that my work is really one of rehabilitation, transformation and restoration of the humanity, dignity and beauty of the people I find in the archives I work with. This is a shift from the more academic understanding I had of my work over the last 20 years. Now I see the work at hand, as a spiritual and political one.

Ilić Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of »Sweet Honey in the Rock«, an activist herself, wrote an essay called »Coalition Politics: Turning the Century«, published in a collection of essays titled »Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology« (1983). Her essay supposes a broad coalition of voices opposing structural racism and patriarchy. How do you relate the exhibition and your works to her text? 

Kahlon I chose the text as a space for you and I to engage with the concept of »Soft Solidarity« that you conceived of to frame the two-year program at Galerie Wedding. For me I could more easily engage using the frame of coalition building that Bernice Johnson Reagon’s essay points to. Addressing a women’s music festival, she says while we may want to create small groups of people that are just like us that reinforce our world view, we can’t stay there. We will be trapped in a small room of people just like ourselves. We have to start letting other people in, even if they are very different from us. If we want to build a coalition across race, class, gender, nation, religion, then it will not be comfortable, it will be painful, and it might even feel like dying. I appreciate that idea and it makes me think about our work together off and on over the past six years. I think it’s interesting to reflect on the strong differences in our backgrounds, yet despite the differences, we share many common ethical and political perspectives on culture. The frequency of my recent collaborations with curatorial collective »What, How & for Whom / WHW« of which you are a member, have become increasingly meaningful spaces of growth for my work.  Proposing the essay to you was a way to ask if we can think our work and friendship as a form of coalition building? What do you think about when you read her essay?

Ilić I was moved by the clarity of her position on coalition building as an important way to move forward and the embedded praxis from which it comes. It’s inspiring. What Bernice Johnson Reagon described in this essay written in the 1970s still encapsulates something important about our dialogue over the years, the learning and unlearning that it involves, and its relevance to political struggles today.  Having experienced the violent break down of Yugoslavia and even after working out its consequences, I think what initially drew me to your work is how you approach the notion of violence through humor. How did you begin working with this tension? 

Kahlon The first art class I taught in 2008 was a course I designed based on my own research called »Points of Penetrations: The Grotesque Body and Humor in Contemporary Art«. The class was a way to talk about all the things that mattered to me like race, class and gender, but in a way that actively provoked discomfort, disgust and laughter—so how these things are experienced by the body. We looked at Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque. He writes about the changing perception of the body as being open, porous, sticky and full of fluids and how this changed from the Middle Ages to the closed impermeable and perfect body imaged by the ideals of Enlightenment thinkers. He also develops an idea of liberatory laughter—a laughter that can laugh in the face of death; laughter as liberation. Laughter can help process historical trauma, is cathartic, healing and transcends binary conceptions of the world. It’s a poetic and visceral way to change the narrative. As a viewer, if you laugh you are also implicated in a way you may not want to be – within a history you’d rather not face.  I personally need both humor and beauty to do my work as I am often considering histories of genocide and violent suppression. Margaret Atwood writes: Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. Maybe with some of my work I’m laughing at the history of white men? 

Ilić Where does your interest in books come from? You started a new series of paintings for the exhibition at Galerie Wedding that are based on the book »Die Rassenschönheit des Weibes« (The Racial Beauty of Women) by Dr. C. H. Stratz. Can you tell me more about it? 

Kahlon I started cutting up books almost twenty years ago. For me the act of destroying the book is an important ritualistic moment of performance. The act of destruction is followed by the act of creation. I pick up the dislocated pages of the books and start “talking back” to the book and to the history of western knowledge production. It felt like a liberation when I cut my first book apart. The form has seduced me ever since. There are so many books I want to cut up! I think it’s not very different than the impulse of a bored and angry teenager that defaces their schoolbook.  The project »Die Völker der Erde« began two years ago when I cut apart the 1902 German anthropology book of the same title and responded directly onto the book pages. It’s presented here in its final form of 300 individual drawings. The new paintings are portraits of women found in the book »Die Rassenschönheit des Weibes« (The Racial Beauty of Women) by Dr. C. H. Stratz, published in 1904. He was a German gynecologist that made racial theories of beauty placing white women at the apex of his scale of beauty. The paintings use a new technical process I have been developing this year that layer photo, text and painting in a life-size scale. First, I mount book pages from a 1911 edition of the book onto canvas, then I create a large-scale image transfer of one of the photographs found in the book directly onto the mounted book pages, ending with a third and final stage where I begin to paint on top of the image. In this project both the images and the book pages originate from the same source, Stratz’s book »Die Rassenschönheit des Weibes«. 

Ilić How are you thinking about painting and artistic skill, both of which are central to your artistic practice?

Kahlon In contemporary art education concept is considered more important than material practice. Intellect is more serious than intuition. It’s a binary and disembodied approach to art making that I don’t support. For me, using my hands is a political act and making things is an act of resistance. I started painting as a matter of survival. I used to have a love and hate relationship with painting because of its history and the privileged position it occupies in the history of western art. The only way painting made sense to me when I began making painting was if I literally cut them up. This is where the cutout paintings come from. My paintings always reach past their own disciplinarity and speak to histories of photography, sculpture, and performance.

Painting is a sacred, feminist space where I feel most free in my life.