Satpreet Kahlon

Interview by Maurin Dietrich

Satpreet Kahlon is a Panjabi-born, New York-based artist, educator, and community organizer. Working with what is at hand, she creates a visual vocabulary of seemingly conflicted materials from cloth scraps, plastic sheets, broken vessels, fragments of oil paintings, cardboard, metal and many others, who each find a place in the works. Her transitory and intimate sculptures confront us with the fact that everything precious will always be fragile. Her practice—for which she has been awarded the 2024 Foundwork Artist Prize—is occupied with the spaces in between, moments of anticipation, the joy of becoming (il)legible, slippages, and the hope embedded in abundance.

Maurin Dietrich (MD): There's a work of yours titled Stories Told, Forgotten, 2016. It explores the process of preserving the oral histories and traditions of marginalized cultures living in the US. You center the work around the idea of vessels. You refer to them as "insufficient vessels." The incapability they stand for is preserving your own history, and that we have to let go of “our expectations that we can hold everything.” In this line of thinking I wanted to start this conversation by asking what you are currently holding space for?

Satpreet Kahlon (SK): It's really interesting to go back to old work because what I thought I was doing, and what I was actually doing, are different things, and I hope I'll come to that realization over and over in my life and with my work. Looking back, even though I thought of the work as making room for my familial history in the archive, I was actually trying to make room for myself as a person within my family narrative and mythology.

I grew up living in a house with a ton of extended family, anywhere from 25 to 30 people living in the same place at once, most of them adults. When you’re a child in that environment, and the adults have their own politics and relationships that are complicated and sometimes emotionally and physically violent, for you, as a child, there’s not a lot of space. I think I was in denial about that for a really long time. I felt, and still do, a sense of duty or obligation to my family—to preserve the largely happy stories we tell about who we are, even if they contradict my own lived reality. Especially given everything my elders have gone through, how much of our story has been lost to time, I felt a deep desire to try to remember and record the good stuff for all of us.

But now, I’m actually holding space for myself for the first time in my life. That’s been my main project over the past two years. Remembering and learning where I am in all of it. What parts of my upbringing are myths? What is the truth?

I’m also holding space for the reality of my physical body. I started having symptoms of chronic pain when I was as young as eleven, but it became debilitating by the time I was 22, I think from holding in unacknowledged trauma and also having to work long hours starting at a young age and feeling a lot of pressure to perform emotionally, academically, and financially for my parents. This process has been one of learning what is mine to hold and what isn’t. There’s such a grief in that. The grief of, “Oh, I can only hold 2% of what I want to hold,” but also the preciousness of choosing that 2%. What it means to choose and say, “I have to drop this so that I can hold this.”

“What I thought I was doing, and what I was actually doing, are different things, and I hope I'll come to that realization over and over in my life and with my work. Looking back, even though I thought of the work as making room for my familial history in the archive, I was actually trying to make room for myself as a person within my family narrative and mythology.”

from all of us, 2023; scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, scanned card given to artist on her 4th birthday, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, rain water from the Great Basin in Nevada, journal entry from August 2023

the same cake, again, 2024; scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, paper pulp made from old birthday cards collected from thrift stores in Mill Valley, CA, clay, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, embroidery materials, soil collected from the Marin Headlands

MD: Does this new space you occupy change the daily practice and the form of the works?

SK: To be really honest, I have not made work since I moved to New York six months ago, because I’m not sure how to proceed from this place. I go into my studio almost everyday, but I just keep organizing it in the most tedious ways. I spent two weeks altering every drawer in my studio, pulling it apart and messing with the hardware so that they would all open three inches further. In the moment, it felt like the most important thing, even though, on some level, I’m aware it’s an avoidance strategy.

To confront this new self and the honest truth of who I am becoming is scary, and I haven’t quite done it yet. I feel myself circling it in a spiral. I’m getting closer and closer to gathering the strength. If I let go of all these expectations, and I’m going to the studio for myself for the first time, what does that mean? I think, sadly, it still feels really selfish, which is part of the avoidance, but yeah, we will see.

MD: Your work comes back to questions around legibility, illegibility, and accessibility—dealing with, in your own words “the mostly extractive relationship between marginalized artists and hegemonic institutions, and the audiences who frequent them. It is about the demand for trauma to be performed, aestheticized—designed to be commodified.” Which brings me to the question, who has the right for opacity, or what is the burden of permanent visibility? Can opacity be both an ethical demand and a form of political legitimacy?

SK: Yeah, opacity definitely is, I think, this right to refuse. A strategic refusal.

Before grad school, I was very earnestly trying to communicate with my audience. I thought, if I am clear and if the work is pretty and if the labor of the work is visible, people will come and they will understand. I have a background in education so I thought, “Okay, I can teach people.” Then, in grad school, you're stuck with the same seven people talking about your work over and over again, whether you want their opinion or respect or not. And it became really clear to me within the first two to three months that people are not going to understand what they don't want to understand, and people are not going to listen to what they don't want to hear.

It became so infuriating to make a work, talking about a particular subject, and to have a meandering one hour critique that never really mentioned or contended with that subject. In response to this, opacity became an innate defense mechanism. It was my way of saying, “If you refuse to see me, I am not going to show myself to you.” I wasn’t going to stop making art; I love it too much, and it’s how I better understand myself and the world.

Instead, I started playing with these structures and installations where there is a front and a back. A facade and a ‘body,’ where the body is largely hidden and inaccessible to the viewer—and where the more vulnerable content of the installation, in which I was contending with my own emotions and my interpersonal relationship to my family and myself—was hidden.

I’ve started to loosen up on this structure now, but, for a while, it was a survival mechanism. It’s probably the only way I survived grad school. And I learned that there’s an enjoyment in withholding. I like when people who feel entitled to all of me realize they can’t have it. Even when I’m on display, giving an artist talk or a docent walkthrough, even when the work is vulnerable, because my work is vulnerable, there are parts of me that I get to keep.

Polyester diamond quilted fabric fabricated in China (after Kalf's Still Life with a Chinese Bowl, Nautilus Cup and Other Objects), 2022; image transfer on handmade reclaimed cardboard substrate, reclaimed wood, staples, polyester diamond quilted fabric collected from recycling plant in Seattle in July 2022

MD: This brings me to my next question: how can a gaze be returned? This can be so tricky to navigate in a white cube space with its specific set of conditions, traditions, histories, and the way we move through it.

SK: In the last year, I have found that the most meaningful way to return the gaze is actually not even to return it. It’s just to leave the space.

My financial situation has been very precarious my whole life, but, in the last two years, my partner, who works in tech, went from the public sector to the private sector and started making a lot of money. Suddenly, when making decisions about my career, I didn’t have to think, “But do I have to do this to make money?” and, because of that, I have the power to say no for the first time. When I ask for something that feels reasonable or non-negotiable and I don’t get it, I don’t have to fight. I just say, “Okay, bye!”

But that’s the fucked up part. I’m essentially less marginalized now, and so I finally have the power to return the gaze in a meaningful way. I have tried so hard to make change from inside a space for years, but the cost of that, mentally and physically, was so high. The power to leave, on the other hand, is much more rewarding and allows me to preserve my physical and emotional health.

"In the last year, I have found that the most meaningful way to return the gaze is actually not even to return it. It’s just to leave the space.”

MD: Absolutely. I read somewhere that “history is full of people who just didn’t.”

SK: I had this realization; I was like, "I'll just play the long game." So what if these awards don't want to award me now, if these galleries don't want to see me now? I'll just be one of those artists who's making work till I'm 90 and then someone finds me when I'm 95 and they're like, "Oh, we want to give you a show," and that'll be fine, because I can survive until then. And that wasn't true for my whole life and that feeling is real. And then, off-topic, but I always wonder why people pretend to be poor when they're not because it's so fun to have money.

MD: The only people who glorify poverty are the ones who never actually experienced any of it.

SK: Yes.

the inscrutable shape of longing, 2023; 5-channel video, 6-channel audio, fishing net collected by the duwamish tribe during a cleaning of the duwamish river, limestone, pigment, wax, beads, mirror, embroidery materials collected from community, scrap wood, objects representing loss collected from community members, oyster shells, copper flashing, cardboard, embroidery materials, wax, beads, pipe, wire, plaster, scrap wood, weaving yarn.

MD: One of the questions that came to mind while looking through your projects departs from a story someone told me a long time ago. It's about a woman in her mid 60s. She is deeply religious and goes to her local church to pray to a statue of Maria and her child. The church has fewer and fewer people who go there and eventually gets demolished, and the statue becomes a part of a collection of a local museum nearby. The woman continues to visit the statue, now in a white cube. She kneels down in front of it and continues her daily prayers. The museum administration does not know how to handle this act of faith in the context of the museum. In the end, she is asked not to kneel in front of it because they can not keep her from visiting the museum. She continues to pray in front of the work, she just does not kneel anymore.

I don't know if that resonates with you but, I wonder: in a society in which the institution of the church is no longer serving the needs of the people, do art institutions (often situated in church-like architectures when you think of dimensions and the places they are located in an urban landscape) in a way, maybe become the place where we hold space for different kind of prayer?

SK: I hadn’t heard that story. It’s really touching, and the grief for the loss of intimacy and the restriction of her embodying a reverence towards the painting is relatable. The act of kneeling, what is more reverent than that? But I don’t think I’ve been to a museum that actually felt like a public space, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gallery that felt like you could freely enter it in any state. So, for me, I don’t turn to these spaces for spiritual fulfillment or a holy experience.

I love art, I love artists, and I have had holy experiences with both, but that is despite of, and not because of, the museum or the gallery. When you go to an artist's studio and they are not precious with the work, and you see the work alongside the mess and the remnants of their lunch, then the work feels so palpably of this world and of the body. That feels holy to me. But the institution is often trying to remove the work from this human, time-based decay.

Like the thought of farting in a museum feels sacrilegious, but every artist has farted while making their work. I wonder how many times Van Gogh picked his nose while painting Starry Night. The museum seems to want you to forget that, but through forgetting the human conditions that made the work, so much of the holiness of the work is gone for me.

The best experience I’ve ever had showing my work was at Coffin Farm, which is artist Von Coffin’s family farm, where they have shows you can install almost anywhere on the farm itself. I decided to install my work in the field where the goats and pigs graze. The sculptures were made largely from cardboard, wood, and lime, and the animals loved the taste of it. So, even as I was installing, they were chasing me to eat it. I was installing it at the same time that I was installing two stressful institutional shows, and it was the complete antithesis of those experiences. I had so much fun, even though no one really got to see the work except for the animals. I waited until the last minute to install it, but by the time the show opened the next day, the goats and pigs had demolished it. The work was just flat debris trampled in the grass. Von photographed the work for the next year and a half until it basically disintegrated. That was the holiest experience I’ve had with showing my work in any space.

“I don’t think I’ve been to a museum that actually felt like a public space, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gallery that felt like you could freely enter it in any state. So, for me, I don’t turn to these spaces for spiritual fulfillment or a holy experience. I love art, I love artists, and I have had holy experiences with both, but that is despite of, and not because of, the museum or the gallery. When you go to an artist's studio and they are not precious with the work, and you see the work alongside the mess and the remnants of their lunch, then the work feels so palpably of this world and of the body. That feels holy to me.”

MD: I love this story of the non-human exhibition visitor! Or actually, you, as a human, were much more of a visitor in their world than the other way around.

SK: They were taking it out of my hands. They were the biggest fans of my work. No one has loved my work the way they love my work.

MD: You mentioned somewhere that, as a child, you were Fascinated by David Macauley’s 1988 book The Way Things Work, which showed the inside of payphones or submarines, and so on, you reconstructed these machines with whatever materials you could get your hands on. Do you remember the first work of art you made?

SK: I don't think I realized it was art for a long time. Growing up, there was no way I could ask my parents for a sketchbook. We didn't even have pens—it was such a thing. Any time my mom had a call and she had to write down a number, the act of finding a pen was such a labored and fraught process that would end in yelling. That was the state of our house and so, to make what I now see as my first work—which was to hold pieces of used wrapping paper up to a window and trace the patterns on the backside—was a risk and a labor. And now, to think of myself at three years old hiding old wrapping paper, that my mother would have preferred to reuse, and a pen. It felt necessary, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to call it art.

Even when I went to college at Michigan State University, there was no understanding of that as art really either. There was one grad student who really encouraged me in that direction but, other than that, the professors were mostly traditional craftspeople. So, it took me a really long time to understand any of that as art. I think I still contend with it now, where I feel a little bit like my work doesn't look like real work when it's this messy. It doesn't have this polish, and part of me loves that, but part of me still wrestles with it.

obscured, repeated, 2023; scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, rain water collected from The Great Basin, embroidery materials

MD: You recently wrote about the idea of the joy in abundance, which plays a role in the materials you use for your works, right?

SK: I think it's really interesting that cardboard was the first thing I used to make a sculpture and it's still my favorite. I have too much of it. How many things can you say in your life that you have too much of that you love to use? I can't fuck it up if there's too much.

The scarcity mindset is really real and I don't know if I'll be able to unlearn it, ever. So, anything that helps me just feel like, “No, there's literally just way too much of this thing,” is helpful.

I think about that too from an Indigeneity perspective. A lot of the practices that Indigenous makers are preserving are a part of a lineage that was about using what was readily available and in excess. If we take that principle and apply it to our contemporary context, it actually makes a lot of sense to work with things like cardboard and styrofoam and refuse, even if it doesn’t feel ‘traditionally’ Indigenous.

"I think it's really interesting that cardboard was the first thing I used to make a sculpture and it's still my favorite. I have too much of it. How many things can you say in your life that you have too much of that you love to use? I can't fuck it up if there's too much."

MD: The artist Amy Sillman recently asked, “What is your base unit?” There's an atom, there's an inch, there's an hour, there's a day, there's a hand, there's a year.

Sillman says of her process, “I think my unit is trouble. You go to trouble, then you get out of trouble, then you get back in trouble.” I wonder if you can define that for yourself? What is your work composed of, what do you build on, build through, build with? What’s a defining aspect of your way of doing things?

SK: Oh, my God, yes. This question. I’ve thought about it so much.

If I'm going with my gut reaction on my unit—and this is so, I don't even want to say it, it's so pathetic—I do think it's grief. I do think my unit is grief. So, it's not just grief, it's a grief paired with a kind of....maybe my unit is digging through. It's like being buried for years but still digging towards any light you can sense.

this was a densely wooded hill, 2022; objects collected from community members representing mourning and grief, metal, oyster shells, copper

MD: In preparation for this conversation, we briefly discussed that art is often the place where the duty is to exhaust ourselves. In this context, I would be interested if you can talk a little bit about your non-profit, and the community work and aspects of (re)distribution that you have been facilitating and organizing in that context.

SK: I was raised Sikh and in Sikhism, seva, which is service to others, is one of the main tenets. My family was at the gurdwara every weekend. If you’ve ever been to a gurudwara, you know that anyone can come, and whoever comes is fed a full meal, called langar, with multiple sides and often dessert.

The food that is served is made by families who belong to the congregation, and because seva is a critical component of our culture, there is a lot of honor in cooking langar. A big calendar would get put out in the beginning of the year and families would fight to get to cook for everyone. But because the congregation tends to be so large, you could be feeding over a thousand people every meal. Essentially, when one family signs up to cook, you’re really signing up your entire network. So I came to spend most of my weekends as a child at temple, in the kitchen, around a 50 foot steel table with all my relatives.

And it never mattered what else was going on with our lives. My parents would work double factory shifts and then go do seva. It didn’t matter how tired you were, or if you had a soccer championship or anything. The precedent was to prioritize seva, always, and this followed me into my adulthood and my art practice.

In a way, making art has always felt indulgent to me (this is something I’m working through in therapy), so doing community work felt like a way to balance the scales. And although I’m proud of everything I accomplished: co-founding and running a nonprofit for almost a decade, supporting over 500 artists with opportunities, raising two million dollars to rematriate greenspace to Indigenous community—when the motivation starts to come from a place of obligation or exhaustion, it shows up in the work and in your body. And it started showing up for me.

Choosing to walk away from the organization just after we had acquired land, which had been the project I had been spearheading and fighting for for years—that was the hardest decision I have ever made. We had just fought developers for a year and closed on the land. It was my childhood dream come to life. But it became clear that the organizational structure and pace was one that, for me, meant perpetual exhaustion and self-punishment. I had to choose between my health and this work. And for the first time, I chose my health. I decided that making art could be enough, and I walked away. I am so grateful to have done it, because I think it saved my life.

Maurin Dietrich

Maurin Dietrich is a curator and current director of Kunstverein München, where she recently worked with artists such as Diamond Stingily, Pati Hill, Andrea Büttner, Tony Cokes, and Pippa Garner, among others. She previously worked at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, where she programmed performances, exhibitions, and publications, schir concepts, and the 9th Berlin Biennale by DIS Magazine. She is the cofounder and director of Fragile, an exhibition and residency space in Berlin. She studied art history and comparative literature in Berlin and taught at the Universität der Künste in the Art in Context program, the ZHDK Masters Program, and the postgraduate program BPA (Berlin Program for Artists). She frequently writes for Mousse Magazine and Cura, among other publications.