Whenever I come close to forgetting that the Frye Museum consistently hosts some of the most interesting exhibits in Seattle, they surprise me by doing it again. Their latest surprise is Look Me in the Eyes, a collection of work in several media by Hayv Kahraman, an Iraqi-born Kurdish refugee who grew up in Sweden after her family fled Baghdad after the Gulf War.
This is her largest solo museum exhibit, and it includes painting, sculpture, collage, and an audio installation. She possesses such an impressive technical mastery in every medium she works with, that if you didn’t know that a single person created it all, you might think this was the work of two or three artists working on the same theme.
Kharaman is interested in the human gaze. She never lets you forget what it means to be watched, and possibly othered. That reality shifts gradually as you walk through the exhibit. Since it’s possible to enter the exhibit from either end of the gallery’s horseshoe-shaped space, and I’m pretty sure if you walked through it from back to front, you would get a different sense of how her work is also looking at you. Because it is.
If you enter it as I did, the first thing you will see is a space filled with paintings of floating faces that are interacting—or possibly merging—with fantastical masks that are growing on long plant stalks that are held in front of the faces by disembodied hands at the edge of the canvas.
At first glance, the faces appear female. And the mask/plants seem to be male—at least they bring a masculine quality to the faces they are partially covering with long monobrows that double as moustaches. Exchangeable, swapped-out eyes that shift perspective and identity, are a recurring motif in Kahraman’s work.
She paints on lush and beautiful khaki-colored linen that looks like it came from the inside of a tent in the desert. She applies paint in delicate layers, that recall Persian miniatures. The edges of the paintings are embellished with bands patterned in blue over a rich, meaty sienna. Marbled coronas or clouds surround and frame the faces, like embodied thought or reflection.
Her work was inspired—but not in a positive way—by the botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of classifying all living organisms on the planet, in every country and culture, using Eurocentric names that paid little or no attention to what they were called locally. It’s a startling reminder that we still use a system of scientific nomenclature that was born out of Western colonialism.
The wonderfully titled 3eoon carries a hint of this. It includes an arresting image of a botanical specimen of an exotic eye/plant that’s been taped to a marbled surface that resembles the cellular structure of the insides of bones. The trapped specimen stares back at you with a resigned but unrelenting gaze of accusation.
Some of the paintings here are small, delicate, and even charming, in spite of their sinister content. Others are large and somewhat terrifying, like the remarkable Love Me Love Me Not. Three women surround a sinister daisy that has eyes for petals, which they are pulling off and consuming, maybe to recover their power of sight, since their own eyes are blank and empty—like eggs embedded in eye-sockets—white, and devoid of irises. Something has been stolen from these women and they are getting it back.
Sometimes Kharaman’s work escapes the frame. She has painted an entire wall of the exhibit with the fermented beet juice that’s used to make torshi, a staple of Arabic cuisine. The reference to fermentation is a reference to the fact that we all contain multitudes, which goes to the very basis of what it means to exist and co-exist with other species and cultures, a word that seems to have a double meaning here for her.
At the end of the exhibit, or the beginning, depending on where you come in, are the Brick Palms. They’re made of bricks that are painted with eyes—you are never not watched in this show—and stacked to resemble the date palms that have been native to Iraq since Mesopotamian times. War, pollution, and climate change have been hard on them and they are now dying off. Somber, arresting, dignified and silent, these sculptures are like ancient watchers of the depredation of modern civilization.
Did you ever get the feeling that someone was watching you? And possibly judging or assessing you? And maybe even trying to erase you with their gaze? That possibility of surveillance, assessment, judgement, and othering is never far from Kharaman’s mind. Nor will it be from yours. Even after you leave, you will sense these eyes watching you.
Kathleen Cain
Kathleen Cain was a journalist and a creative director at the legendary Heckler Associates for many years before starting her own communications consulting firm. Find her writings at www.postalley.org.
Through February 2, Frye Art Museum, located at 704 Terry Avenue in Seattle, Washington, displays Hayv Kahraman: Look Me in the Eyes. Hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.fryeartmuseum.org.
