Within the heart of Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition on the Frye Artwork Museum, lies a sound sales space of types. Surrounded on three sides by a taut, semi-opaque artificial pores and skin, a speaker dangles from the ceiling and performs a girl’s measured, assertive voice on a 22-minute loop. It’s from a tape Kahraman’s mom despatched to Swedish immigration authorities over 1 / 4 century in the past: a rejection of their rejection of her household’s asylum utility.
The piece is named Sizar, and it’s the oldest materials in her exhibition, “Look Me within the Eyes.” Within the audio, her mom, Sizar Barzendji, invitations Swedish immigration authorities to chop into her pores and skin, take DNA samples, and have a look at her cells to confirm her identification. She asserts that she is “not a cockroach to be stepped on” or denied or erased.
Born in Baghdad, Kahraman fled Iraq through the Gulf Conflict when she was 11 years previous. She and her household landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport following a month-and-a-half-long journey organized by a paid smuggler. Upon arrival, Kahraman’s mom instructed them to flush their faux Danish passports down airport bogs, starting a yearslong problem to safe asylum in Sweden as (actually) undocumented refugees. Swedish authorities declined her household’s utility after 5 years, stating that their story and identification couldn’t be verified. Their utility was in the end accepted.
Via a variety of artforms and media, the exhibit constantly rejects the surveillance, ecocide, and dispossession defining how and why hundreds of thousands of individuals search asylum worldwide.
Take Sizar’s partitions: Manufactured from mylar, the sales space’s floor resembles marble. Kahraman encountered the sample throughout current research of Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century scientist from Sweden who established trendy taxonomy and stays a supply of nationwide delight there. After studying a weblog put up criticizing Linnaeus because of the devastating results of his taxonomies, which included rankings of human races, Kahraman traveled from her studio in Los Angeles to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which holds a duplicate of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus from 1737. The e-book’s endpages have been embellished utilizing a way known as “marbling.”
within the e-book’s contents in addition to its marbled design, Kahraman revisited Turkish artists who use the nearly-millennium-old creative method; she began experimenting with the artform herself—splattering paint onto water blended with carrageenan, a seaweed-based thickening agent, all held in a five-by-ten-foot tray, after which dipping canvases into the pigmented fluid. How this course of appears in its remaining kind—the three-dimensional swirls of coloured water transplanted onto the planar floor of canvas—is inherently random and uncontrollable, ruled much more by fluid mechanics than creative intervention (save for the occasional stir or blow on the water to herd the diffusing paint simply so).
Kahraman says marbling’s aleatory nature is healing; her systematic strategy to work and her want for management are, in her eyes, tied to experiences as a refugee and marginalized individual in Sweden. “If I made a mistake, it will imply that I might get deported … that is the thought course of that went by means of my thoughts [in Sweden],” she says. “Think about having to let go of that concern of creating errors and actually embracing the glitch, the error. It was very therapeutic.”
Marbling patterns undulate throughout the 4 rooms holding Kahraman’s work on the Frye, albeit deployed for a variety of functions. For Brick Palm, onyx-colored marbling provides a trio of towering stacked bricks the charred look of burnt and useless timber, an homage to the hundreds of thousands of palm timber which have died over the course of many wars in Iraq, but stay bodily erect due to the power of their root programs.
In the meantime, in Eyeris, a large-format portray located within the exhibit’s first room, greyscale billows of marbled linen creep from the highest left and backside proper of the canvas, providing austere environment for the 4 ladies within the portray’s heart, all of whom resemble Kahraman however lack irises. One of many ladies is lifeless and a plant sprouts from her eyes; irised eyes dangle from the information of the plant the place blossoms must be. One lady reaches out towards the eye-blossoms, whereas one other prepares to put an irised eye on prime of her personal like a contact lens.
Kahraman dubs her pseudo-cyborgian flora her “‘fuck you’ vegetation”—rebuking the Linnean worldview. Her iris-less topics are a nod to the methods some refugees deploy to subvert and refuse surveillance. She says her painted topics goal to say, “I do know you are taking a look at me, however you do not get to have a look at me. You do not get to scan me. You do not get to pin me down like a pressed plant.”
On the base of Sizar’s trusses, Kahraman contains grains of silicon carbide, a crystal resembling sand utilized in ballistic vests and sandpaper, as soon as once more pointing to the types of self-erasure which are generally obligatory for individuals searching for asylum. (Asylees will generally take away their fingerprints with sandpaper or acid.) The sales space’s sandlike base in addition to its mylar envelope symbolize refugees’ declare to their proper to opacity—together with her mom’s vocal insistence upon that proper.
Her mom was identified with lung most cancers in late 2018, and she or he handed away in July 2020. Unsurprisingly, the marbling for Sizar is in contrast to the others. Kahraman prevented swirling the paint because it floated in water in order that the globs retained their mobile resemblance. Grieving her mom’s loss, Kahraman says she struggled to search out the proper steadiness between the “private” and the “political.” Particularly, she hesitated listening to her mom’s 22-minute tape to Swedish authorities, although she knew the recording may assist her recuperate reminiscences of her life as a refugee and stake political claims by means of artwork. The ultimate means of that work, pouring sand-like crystals into Sizar’s trusses throughout set up on the Frye, in the end felt “ritualistic” to Kahraman.
“That is an altar for my mom,” she says. “The private is political, and I totally imagine that the political is private, all of it, however part of me was a little bit afraid … I used to be afraid that if I have been to incorporate her voice, it will simply be about her voice. However it’s not. It’s not solely her voice. It is the voice of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”
Look Me within the Eyes is on view on the Frye Artwork Museum (704 Terry Ave, Seattle) by means of February 2, 2025. Free admission.
