This conversation will focus on the ways artist Rajkamal Kahlon (B.A., art studio, ‘96) and scholar Bakirathi Mani engage visual, ethnographic, historical and literary archives inways that are absent in recent discussions about thearchive and the archival impulse.

Both Kahlon and Mani share an interest in the histories and representations of the colonial and racialized other, interrogating the archive in multivalent ways that reconfigure it as more than a storage of artifacts and documents, and technology of rule and surveillance. On another level, they explore how these archives are haunted, and how the role of art indexes the oppression that underpins this haunting. Specifically, Kahlon will present her research and art practice in relation to artworks included in her mid-career retrospective,
“And Still I Rise,” currently on view at the University Library Gallery at CSU Sacramento. Mani will discuss select artworks by South Asian American artists that she incisively analyzes in her acclaimed book,
Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America
(Duke University Press, 2020).

The conversation will be facilitated by Susette Min, professor of Asian American Studies, independent curator and author of Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018).

Rajkamal Kahlon is a Berlin-based American artist and professor of painting at University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Her paintings, drawings, and performances have been exhibited internationally in museums, foundations, and galleries in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Bakirathi Mani is Professor in the Department of English Literature, and Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her scholarship focuses on Asian American studies, visual culture, art history, postcolonial theory and feminist and queerof color studies.

WHEN: Wednesday, December 1, 2021 from 12-1:30 pm

WHERE: Online. Register here.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies, Department of Art and Art History, Middle East/South Asian Studies, the Manetti Shrem Museum, and the University Galleries, CSU Sacramento.