About a year ago, the artist Hayv Kahraman immersed herself in marbling, a technique ancient in origin but entirely new to her. “It’s a total obsession,” she says. “I just marbled every single thing I could get a hold of.” After a deep dive into marbling’s history (tracing back to the early 12th century in Japan) and various methods (which are often surprisingly “secretive,” she says), Kahraman opted to work with acrylic paints suspended in water and carrageenan, a thickening agent made from moss. The more she marbled in her Los Angeles studio, the more she realized how the process forced her to cede control. Her paintings, usually so carefully rendered, took on a new spontaneity.
The marbling coincided with another nascent interest: colonial botany and its hierarchical, Eurocentric system of naming and categorizing plant life. Kahraman—who became a refugee in Sweden at age 11 after she, along with her family, fled their home in Iraq in 1992, during the Gulf War—saw an obvious connection to the unjust taxonomies foisted upon humans, especially migrants and minorities.
These parallel pursuits led to “Look Me in the Eyes,” Kahraman’s beguiling new solo exhibition, and her largest solo museum show to date, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco. On her linen canvases, sprouting plants, eyes, lips, and hands mingle with dark-haired, poppy-lipped women. As in her earlier paintings, Kahraman’s semi-autobiographical forms nod to Renaissance figuration, Japanese woodblock prints, and Persian miniatures, but there’s a ferocity to this body of work that feels fresh.
“What’s powerful is that you see the consistency and the through line, yet this is a dramatic moment of push in terms of subject matter and formal composition,” Ali Gass, ICA SF’s director, said on the show’s opening night earlier this month.
The women are agents of rebellion, standing their ground amid swirling marbled seas. They seem hungry, even angry, desirous of what’s theirs for the taking. Call them women on the verge of getting what they want. In the evocative Love Me Love Me Not (all works are from 2023), three women hover around a flower-like object, plucking off eyeballs as if they were petals. The central figure slurps one into her mouth, a faint trickle of paint running down her chin. In Eyeris, a riveting, stormy scene, one figure appears ready to pop a loose eyeball into her own socket, like a contact.
Jarringly, across the exhibition, the women’s own milky white eyes have no irises. Only the disembodied eyes do. Kahraman says she found herself painting eyes this way for months without knowing why. “And then it just clicked,” she says. She remembered that a cousin in Sweden had told her about refugees she worked with, mostly coming from Afghanistan. Many of them had used acid or sandpaper to remove their fingerprints—“anything that would prevent them from being scanned and being placed in the biometric system of tracing and identifying who they are,” Kahraman says. It was an act of resistance: erasing a part of their bodies in order not to be erased themselves. She realized that was what she was doing with the eyes. “I’m removing the irises as a way of saying, ‘No, you don’t get to scan me. You don’t get to see inside me.’”
Kahraman plays with this idea of personhood in the way she layers her paintings as well. She marbles first and then hand-paints her figures and intricate Kurdish patterns on top, but with such a translucency that it’s not easy to decipher her order of operations. This blurring of back- and foreground is intentional. “As someone who has been very ‘othered,’ that’s important to me, to demolish these polarities of self,” she says.
Kahraman is an artist who researches her interests deeply. Her curiosity about botany was piqued when she came across an article critical of the 18th-century Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of naming and categorizing living organisms and who Kahraman had learned about growing up in Sweden. “He’s also considered the father of biological racism, because he categorized the human species in four ‘varieties,’ as he called them, but essentially races,” Kahraman says. “He had, of course, the white European race always in the top of the hierarchy, and the African at the bottom.”
To undo the hierarchies Linnaeus’s work imposed on all things living, Kahraman focused on what she calls her “oppressed plants.” Mimicking the taped-and-pressed style of an herbarium, she depicts plants native to Iraq, like berbeen (a nutritious weed), botnij (a type of mint), and qazan (berries you’d put in a smoothie). These plants feature throughout the show, including on wallpaper she designed for the occasion, and they are perhaps most astonishing in her small flax fiber works. From afar, they seem almost 3D, as if the leaves—and eyes, those ubiquitous emblems of surveillance—are popping off the delicate fibers. In Qazan, strands of inflorescence from a palm tree are woven into the fiber and dangle off the bottom edge, root-like. Her sculptures of “zombie” palm trees made from marbled bricks stand nearby, metaphors for the way palm trees remain erect long after they die due to their entwined roots.
Her oppressed-plants wallpaper covers a small room at the back of the museum, offset from the main space, where a 1997 recording of her late mother, Sizar, pleading her family’s case to immigration officials plays on loop. Five years after their family entered Sweden as undocumented asylum seekers, they applied for citizenship to stay in the country. They were denied. Sizar recorded this tape as an appeal. “The basis for the denial was that my mom couldn’t prove that she was who she was. She was a 49-year-old woman at the time. Imagine being told, ‘Well, we don’t believe who you are.’ That was a massive trigger for her,” says Kahraman. “She uses all of these metaphors, like: If you don’t believe who I am, come take a cell from my body, look inside my body.”
For a show that is so much about looking, this 21-minute recording, which Kahraman and her sister uncovered after their mother’s death in 2020, forces you to listen. And what you hear is one woman’s undeniable fear of being erased. Kahraman, now a mother herself, understands what a desperate attempt for control looks (and sounds) like. “When you’ve lived through wars, through trauma—I’m a survivor of domestic violence—you tend to want to control your environment in order to protect yourself,” she says. “And my work, and my life, tends to be very controlled. It’s a form, for me, of safety. But it becomes excessive.”
“That’s part of what marbling has taught me,” she continues. “To not have to know everything. Because there is no way to control the marbled surface…. You lift the canvas, and it’s gorgeous. Sometimes it’s not perfect, but it allows you to be okay with that.”
For Kahraman, maybe that’s what it means to progress: to accept the mistakes as a feature, not a bug. “I’ve been pushing for this for a long time. This marbling, it allowed me to get there. I mean, I’m not ‘there,’ you’re never ‘there,’ but I’m closer.”
From Vogue website
