Western Washington University's Western Gallery will open a new exhibition of paintings by artist Rajkamal Kahlon on Thursday, October 8, with a free public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. The show, titled "Are My Hands Clean?" runs through January 23, 2027, and presents 14 mixed-media works that engage directly with colonial history, political violence, and the suppression of Third World communist movements by the United States government.
Kahlon, who was born in Auburn, California in 1974 and now lives and works in Berlin, Germany, has spent more than 25 years creating work that challenges what she calls Western knowledge production. Her method involves physically intervening in historical texts and scientific publications, disassembling books and using their pages as the canvas for her own paintings. The figures depicted in those texts are then altered and reconceived, directly confronting the context in which they were originally produced.
What the Exhibition Contains
The 14 mixed-media works in "Are My Hands Clean?" are nearly all life-sized representations of women. Inspired by Third World communist movements in places ranging from Brazil to Indonesia, Kahlon paints her subjects as warriors, armed with grenades, machine guns, and machetes. Each figure bears an insignia associated with a particular political group, bringing buried histories of anti-imperialism into direct conversation with the present.
The show also includes a project called "Die Voelker der Erde" (People of the Earth), which originated during a 2017 artist residency at the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna, Austria. During that residency, Kahlon discovered a copy of a 1902 German anthropology publication in a nearby bookstore. She acquired the book and created a series of more than 300 drawings using its pages as the canvas, challenging what she describes as the colonial gaze embedded in scientific and anthropological literature of that era.
A mural-sized wall painting of two bare-chested women flanks one of Kahlon's book-page works in the exhibition. Their large-scale presence is designed to raise questions about how scale and representation function in gallery spaces, and who gets to take up that kind of visual space.
Kahlon has also curated a series of playlists for the exhibition, with individual listening stations representing distinct geographical regions. Songs include "Are My Hands Clean?" by Sweet Honey in the Rock, "Give Us Our Land" by Harry Belafonte, and Woody Guthrie's "Tear the Fascists Down," among others. The listening component makes the exhibition multisensory and adds a dimension that extends the work beyond the visual into music traditions of resistance and solidarity.
About the Artist and Her International Profile
Kahlon received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has held solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Gallery Wedding in Berlin, P-P-O-W in New York, Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, and Kunstverein Konstanz in Germany. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Artists Space in New York, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City.
She is currently a professor of painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. Bringing her work to Bellingham is a significant programming choice by the Western Gallery, which has consistently presented internationally recognized artists whose work challenges viewers to engage with difficult histories.
Visiting the Western Gallery
The Western Gallery is located in the Fine Arts building on the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. Regular gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is always free.
The October 8 opening reception runs from 5 to 7 p.m. and is open to the public, meaning community members who are not affiliated with WWU are warmly welcome. Receptions at the Western Gallery typically include an opportunity to view the work in a social setting, speak with gallery staff about the exhibition, and sometimes engage with the artist directly if they are in attendance.
For information about public programs running alongside the exhibition, including any talks, tours, or community events tied to Kahlon's work, visit the Western Gallery website. The gallery typically schedules additional programming for exhibitions of this scope and duration.
Western Washington University's cultural programming is one of the genuine assets the campus contributes to the broader Bellingham community. Exhibitions like this one are a reminder that the university's galleries function as public art spaces, not just academic venues. Anyone in Whatcom County with an interest in contemporary art, history, or political art traditions will find this show worth a visit before it closes in late January.
For another look at what is happening in Bellingham's arts community this fall, see coverage of the Whatcom Studio Tour coming up October 3 to 4 and October 10 to 11 across the county.
