Painting and sculpture that elude categories.
Hayv Kahraman’s figures take on different roles in each body of work. They might be contorted in poses resembling acrobats or torture subjects, or they might be bound by black, intestinal shapes. In her largest solo museum exhibition to date, this “army of fierce women,” as she once described them, is entwined with a vegetal motif. Titled Look Me in the Eyes, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, the exhibition includes new paintings, sculptures, and an audio work. In some scenes, the women lack irises; in others, bodiless eyes sprout from the ground like saplings.
Will Fenstermaker
You’ve related the marbled pattern that encompasses these figures to botany, Ottoman painting, porousness, contagion. It’s a relatively new motif in your work. What are the women up against, and how did it begin?
Hayv Kahraman
It started a few years ago when I came across accounts on Instagram that showed people doing Turkish marbling. It’s a particular technique called ebru, and it’s slightly less abstract and fluid than, say, Japanese wet-ink. You have somewhat more control over the process, such that you can see some of these Turkish marblers making flower motifs, for example. It’s truly amazing, and it was living in my mind as a sort of backdrop when I encountered an article about Carl Linnaeus, who developed the binomial nomenclature system for identifying plants and animals—their genus and species.
The article was about the gendered, sexual system he devised for classifying organisms. He didn’t refer to a plant’s organs as pistils and stamens; he called them “husband” and “wife,” and he called petals the “bedchambers” of the married couple. He really saw flowers as sexual beings. He’s famous for this supposedly objective system, but of course he and his pupils were traveling the globe giving everything Latin names and erasing what these plants meant to local people, ignoring how they operated within different systems. He was an incredibly religious man, and he believed his ability to translate nature was divined from God. Linnaeus injected these prejudices and latent hierarchies into the natural world.
I was born in Iraq and arrived in Sweden in the early 1990s as a refugee from the Gulf War. At age ten, I entered the Swedish educational system, where Linnaeus was taught as this genius figure. He was even on the 100-kronor note. I remember visiting his botanical garden in Uppsala.
WF
Right. Everything is shorn of its cultural context and divided according to preconceived boundaries, which is a colonial mentality.
HV
Yes, that is what a herbarium is—a colonial mentality. As I dug deeper into the herbarium, I started feeling angrier and more indignant. I was triggered by his obsessive need to acclimate these foreign, exotic plants into the Swedish climate. I couldn’t help but draw parallels to what I felt, first as an undocumented refugee and then as an immigrant.
WF
You have this system of classification created by a European scientist charged by God, and you have this fluid process of abstract painting. How did the two come together?
HV
I was seeking out Linnaeus’s books at the Huntington Library, near where I live in Altadena, and found an illustrated copy of Hortus Cliffortianus. I opened it to find that the frontispiece was beautifully marbled. That sparked something, and I sought out some of the library’s books on the history of marbling. I learned that Turkish marbling can be used as decorative paper, but it’s also used to certify legal documents because there is no way to forge the marbling. It’s a monoprint, and the process is incredibly unpredictable. Much of the knowledge about marbling has been lost because artisans were secretive about their techniques. I felt an affinity toward this art form that refuses to be reproduced or to assimilate.
I’m an artist who’s very controlled in her work. I never start a painting without knowing exactly what it’s going to be. There’s a lot of prep work in my process. I attribute that to having survived and grown up through so many traumatic experiences: I’m a survivor of war and a survivor of domestic violence. Marbling, however, allowed me to let go of needing to control what the painting will look like, how it will be perceived, or how legible it will be.
WF
I’m struck by how the figures interact with the marbling. In places it seems to spill over their flesh; in others it seems to come out of their bodies; and in still others the two don’t seem to touch at all. The skin and the marbling have an unsettled relationship, and the ebru appears almost as a miasma, a force that settles over everything.
HV
I marble between five and seven works at once, and I’m left with these substrates that have places that have been marbled and places where the canvas is open. Instead of controlling where the figures go, I have to adapt to fill a space. That is scary for me. But it also pushes me to go beyond how I usually work.
In Love Me Love Me Not (2023), the boundaries are quite blurry; as a viewer, you may not know whether the skin or the marbling was painted first. I can’t help but love those areas. As you can tell from my past work about contagion and microbiota, my mind goes to histological tissue as seen through the microscope, but the works also have a landscape quality. There’s a concept called refugia that describes places where the landscape has suffered intense disturbances, yet life resists and grows. That’s what I’m responding to—this idea that where the marbling touches the figures, the boundaries between them collapse.
WF
I’d like to ask about your sculptures with their stacks of black bricks that resemble dead palm trees, which are indigenous to Iraq and an iconic part of the California landscape. Some of the bricks have marbling on them, and others are painted with eyes. How did they develop?
HV
As I was doing research, I kept asking myself, Well, what plant do I respond to? As you suggest, the date palm tree is an emblematic symbol of both the Arab region and California. There’s a history to that migration. At one point, the majority of the dates grown in Palm Springs came from Iraqi seeds. When I was young, my mother owned a palm orchard in Baghdad, and we used to grill kebabs there. Now it’s occupied by a militia. There used to be over thirty million date palm trees in Iraq, and now there’s only a fraction of that because of war, desertification, and increased water salinity.
So I Googled “dead palm tree” and just started crying. Dead palm trees lose their fronds, but they stay standing for more than one hundred years; their root structure is horizontal, and the trees cling to each other. They have a sort of charred color. You can imagine how a grove starts to resemble to tombstones, like zombies that refuse to leave.
WF
Because of the eyes, I also felt they resemble watchtowers.
HV
Eyes repeat across the exhibition. One of the references is Eurodac, which is a centralized database to monitor asylum seekers in Europe. If you enter Italy, you’re scanned during a psychologically taxing process. If you’re rejected, you cannot go to Spain, or Denmark, or France; you’re denied your freedom of movement. It becomes a death sentence for many people, and so they remove traces of their bodies to circumvent being erased. People remove their fingerprints with sandpaper or by pouring acid on their hands. It’s incredibly violent, but it’s their way of saying, “You cannot categorize me.”
This idea is also relevant to the audio piece. My mother and I were very close. When she passed away in 2020 from lung cancer, my sister found a cassette tape that my mom had recorded in 1997 of her pleading with the immigration office to let us stay in Sweden. At that point, our citizenship request had been rejected. They said they couldn’t confirm she was who she said she was. She was very emotional, and the tape is just her voice pleading for twenty minutes.
WF
It’s very powerful. She’s saying, “I beg you, listen to me; I’m a human being. How can I not be who I am?” But she’s speaking to nobody; it’s a monologue.
HV
She’s saying, “Come take a piece of my skin; I’m not an insect in your backyard.” She was trying to integrate, but they wouldn’t let her in. Around the time that we recovered the recording, my paintings started lacking irises, and at first I didn’t know why. People would come to the studio, and I would just say, “It’s about border control.” Really, it’s about this tension between sacrificing your identity and withholding your identity from these immense state systems.
WF
It becomes a mere datapoint in defining the citizen and noncitizen. When I listened to the narration, I thought of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Freedom of Speech Itself. He analyzed voiceprints of asylum seekers saying the word you, which the British government used to stereotype accents as a way of verifying identity and, by extension, of circumscribing Britishness. Your work is less about the bureaucratic functions of the system and more about the person who’s navigating that.
HV
I’m pleased you say that because there are so many artists doing incredible work about surveillance, and at one point I felt insecure about this project. Omar Kholeif, a curator in Sharjah, wrote me a letter in which they said they might have thought the speaker was an Egyptian actress. This is my mother’s performance. The psyche of a refugee is that you’re always performing. In the immigration review you have to perform your suffering, but not too much. You have to cry, but only the right amount. You have to remember your story perfectly, which is very hard when you’re suffering from PTSD. Entire gaps of my childhood are missing
So why would my figures have irises in a time when the police are scanning your eyes to deny your history? In my previous works, the figures return the gaze, and they find agency in that. Here, there’s no returning of the gaze. It’s protected.
From the Bomb Magazine website
