Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition The Foreign in Us at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University in Houston is framed by an Audre Lorde quote: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Kahraman was born in Baghdad and raised in Sweden after moving there as a refugee. The exhibition focuses on paintings and drawings from the last five years of Kahraman’s work.
Kahraman gives a vital tactility to her flat surfaces by employing centuries-old marbling practices and incorporating patterns from Kurdish textiles. During a preview of the exhibition, curator Frauke V. Josenhans described the Ebru technique of marbling, and listed the various objects Kahraman puts into the pigmentation liquid, including bricks, leaves, and sandpaper. “What else?” Josenhan asked the artist, who laughingly replied, “my body, my daughter’s body.”
Kahraman’s canvases are populated with women in Beyoncé-like formation. Bodies fold in on themselves—knees over foreheads, thighs over ears, heads nestled into groins—making the self a home, a sufficient unit of one’s own. No one of the women takes primacy; rather, they are all equally engaged in refusing to be a background. “It’s become a necessity for me to reiterate her again and again in the work,” Kahraman has said of the repeated femme figure that has populated her paintings for years now. “I look around the studio and I’m surrounded by these women…an army here. It’s almost compulsive, you repeat again and again. It becomes a form of repair.” While their bodies are highly expressive, the femmes’ stony faces betray nothing. They question who is looking at whom, flipping the gaze between subject and viewer so much that it becomes a continuum, collapsing any start and endpoint of the looking beyond judgment or analysis.
An interest in bioscience began when Kahraman’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019. In a January 2024 interview with Rice News, Kahraman recalls her mother asking after doctor’s appointments “why do I have to be fighting? I’ve lived through so many wars throughout my lifetime, and now I’m at war with my body.” Kahraman then realized that how immunology characterizes the battle between self and other in the language of disease mirrored the rhetoric of migration. Many pieces in the exhibition draw on Kahraman’s examination of the metaphorical weight of antibodies. The front wall of the opening gallery is awash in pink pigment made from the juices of torshi, pickled vegetables popular in cuisines of the SWANA region. Entanglements with torshi no. 2 (2022), features a quartet of women with thick strands of what look like pink guts tied up into their hair, the loose ends entwining. Torshi becomes an allegory for how human beings can live symbiotically with the “other.” Kahraman takes gut health to a whole new level, pushing the stomach beyond a symbol in pop psychology to tether it to the condition of exile.
Experts have long called the stomach the second brain. Our second brain feeds on bacteria, or foreign bodies, in order to survive. One’s relationship to self, and the literal function of our bodies, is predicated on letting the other in. Kahraman asks not just what it means to be treated as a foreign body but also what it means to live not despite but as a result of foreign bodies. In NeuroBust no. 4 (2022), a work of oil on linen, black intestines act as a breathing tube to a stunning armless bust.
In The Foreign in Us, the innocuous transforms into the sinister before your eyes. The more one looks, the more one can see the writhing critique of xenophobia just under Kahraman’s immaculate paint. In Say Aah (2021), a woman stares down the viewer, her lean-muscled shoulders hunched as she attempts to consume a fish-shaped grenade whole. In Swallowing Antibodies (2021), the femme figure defiantly dangles Y-shaped structures (the same shape as antibodies) before her mouth. She clutches other similar shapes with her multiple arms, daring the viewer to stop her.
An entire room is dedicated to Kahraman’s delicate drawings, which she uses to model her paintings. A large wooden board displays tracing paper laced with Kahraman’s choreographed women, as well as trial marbling squares dipped into small bits of paper and fabric. These miniature pieces showcase her skill on the line level as well as her investment in experimentation. In Antibody Drawing 2 (2021), a five-legged woman threads her head through a pair of her thighs, carrying rolls of paper between her toes. Some of these works are less embodied and more abstract. Not Yet Titled (2023), features clusters of eyeballs painted over a marbled surface of shredded paper.
While The Foreign in Us asks audiences to recognize difference, Kharaman does not assign a narrative. There’s repetition and a clear message behind the exhibition’s crown of symbols—steely, contortionist femmes, grenades, bacteria-ridden torshi, antibodies—but Kahraman refrains from feeding her viewers neat ideology. Stunning yet impenetrable, Kahraman’s army of women engages as much with selfhood as with the other; an ode to, rather than a manual for, living with difference.
From The Brooklyn Rail website
