>>  >>  A NEW DEFINITION OF PEACE THROUGH GROTESQUE LAUGHTER

Within the spaces of the grotesque body and carnival laughter as defined by Mikhail  Bakhtin, philosopher and literary theorist, we find a world continually unmade. Carnival forms of laughter contribute a key role in this unmaking and upending of all that is established and official. The laughter is communal, an all people's laughter that does not separate itself from it's object, the world. In this collapse of distance between subject and object, I suggest we locate a model to rethink what peace can mean and how it can function. Regenerative  modes produced through the social and political collapse of power in the grotesque offer new definitions of peace which move beyond concepts of passivity and inaction. It points to a continually active, growing definition that cannot be contained or completed mirroring the grotesque itself.

Rajkamal Kahlon interrogates the ideological positions of representation as they are linked to forms of racial and colonial authority. In her dialectical engagement with historical texts she critiques the will to "make" humans implicit in the visual practices backed by repressive regimes of power in part through the use of violent imagery framed by psychedelia and the human body turned grotesque through its traumatic encounters with colonialism, military rule and torture.

Kahlon is a past participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and her B.A. from the University of California, Davis. Kahlon is a 2006 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and a 2007 recipient of the Lambent Fellowship. Kahlon's work has been exhibited internationally and has been reviewed by the New York Times, the New Yorker and Art Asia Pacific.
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