Did You Kiss the Dead Body?
2012
Drawing
Materials: 2 drawings in 19 pages on 2 Autopsy reports
Collection: Courtesy of the artist.
In Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks, Kahlon exhibits Did You Kiss the Dead Body?, a series of over-painted US army prisoner autopsy reports, and three of her disconcerting cut-out figures, in which found anthropological images are transformed by added symbols of struggle such as grenades or weapons. These compositions use the strategy of collage to expose the colonial gaze and to give a belated visual rehabilitation to the figures depicted. Appropriating and subverting colonial imagery, Kahlon’s work stems from a desire to, in her own words, ‘deal with the revenge, violence and rage inherent in colonial exchanges’.
