Do You Know
Our Names?
Our Names?
2017
media paintings on photo rag paper
media paintings on photo rag paper
Untitled (Blue Polka Dots)
Untitled (Green Stripes)
Untitled (Orange Polka Dots)
Untitled (Two Fingers)
Untitled (Bandage)
Photography has played a central role in the colonial project. Developed in the nineteenth century, it was a popular tool of the Western anthropologist, who used it to document and study foreign people and places. Kahlon has been mining historical texts, archives, and collections for twenty years, searching them for images of non-Western subjects captured by anthropologists and stockpiled in these containers of colonial histories. In Do You Know Our Names?, Kahlon reproduces and enlarges photographs of unnamed women from the German anthropology book, Die Völker der Erde [People of the Earth]. Each image is hand-colored by the artist, a method used by nineteenth-century photographers in an attempt to make the picture appear more lifelike. The artist toggles between calling attention to the violence represented by the original image—where exploited individuals were coerced into sitting before the camera—and moving past it into a gesture of care and healing. Kahlon seeks to liberate the images of these individuals from the labor of performing an imagined ethnic identity that was projected onto them under colonial hegemony. The disempowered, nameless, marginalized objects of racist scientific study are transformed and rehabilitated by the artist’s brush into luminous, decorated, and powerful beings. Through these portraits, Kahlon aims to restore humanity, individuality, and beauty to these women and for the photographed colonial subject at large.