Enter My Burning House

2021
7 acrylic ink drawings on book pages

This project is in memory of my father, Avtar Singh Kahlon (1942–2017), who lived most of his adult life as an immigrant in the United States.

— Rajkamal Kahlon

Enter My Burning House sets out to connect the dots between the history of US environmental conservation, immigration, eugenics, white supremacy, and fascism. On August 5, 2012, a white gunman carried out a premeditated massacre at a gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin (USA). This self-proclaimed white supremacist fatally shot six worshipers including the Sikh priest Prakash Singh and wounded four others. A seventh victim, Baba Punjab Singh, died from causes related to the shooting some eight years later. Kahlon has created portraits for each of the dead through the use of photography and painting applied directly on book pages cut out from a first edition copy of The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by Madison Grant (1916). Grant was a privileged Columbia University law school graduate, a Yale University alum, and a forerunner in the environmental conservation movement. He was also a contemporary of John Muir (the Scottish-American naturalist who helped establish America’s National Park Service) and friend and political ally of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. Grant is often lauded for founding the Bronx Zoo, saving the American bison from extinction, and preserving the redwoods of California. However, he also argued for Nordic superiority and for America to serve as a “civilization preserve”, where only those of Anglo-Saxon and Northwestern-European origins would be admitted. US legislators looked to The Passing of the Great Race when authoring the Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited immigration from Asia, and it was embraced by Adolf Hitler, who regarded it as his “bible”. The portraits in this series are in part an homage to the South Asian immigrant lives taken by a neo-Nazi, and an indictment of America’s deep history of racism and anti-immigration policies built upon a foundation of white-supremacist doctrines and ideologies.