I am obsessed with this woman in Hayv Kahraman’s painting, “The Audience,” which is currently up at the Henry Art Gallery. I can’t stop thinking about her—her gaze, the inky blackness of the swirl that composes her hair, the way her lips look. Baghdad-born, Los Angeles-based Kahraman is obsessed with her too, in interviews referring to the ubiquitous female figure in her work as a singular person taking on many different positions and forms. To her, this person a projection of an “assimilated body,” meaning someone who was taught to think and believe the white European art history was the ideal, in both form and thought.
This ties into Kahraman’s own personal history as a Kurdish refugee, who fled Iraq with her family at the age of 10 to Sweden in order to escape Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Having struggled to become a part of this hyper-white society, her female figure is based on what the artist herself is personally experiencing, an exploration of everything she’s gone through.
“The Audience” is one-third of a three-part series on display. Collectively the series is a comment on benefit concerts (like Live Aid), the relationship between celebrity and refugee, and the self-reflexive feel-good nature of the shows.
In an interview with the Art Newspaper, she specifically recalls a relief concert in 1991 for Kurdish refugees featuring the likes of Whitney Houston, MC Hammer, and Sting performing in front of a video backdrop of impoverished Kurdish bodies.
“From that, I started questioning: How do we mediate images in these humanitarian campaigns, these images of ‘suffering others’, in a way that doesn’t strip them of all their dignity and in a way that allows them a voice?” she said.
Each painting even has a perfect little slit cut into them, cleverly evoking donation boxes, forcing the viewer to reevaluate their relationship with the people depicted in the painting. Stylistically, Kahraman draws on Italian masters from the Renaissance and Japanese ukiyo-e prints to create her works; she has an immense understanding of form, scale, and where the viewer’s eye is meant to be drawn. It’s no mistake that the woman I’m obsessed with is placed right in the center of the crowd. Her gaze immediately invites viewers into the work, making us a part of this audience too, participating in this self-congratulatory spectacle.
Sure, the money is going to a great cause, but how does this centering of celebrity co-opt the struggles that refugees face every day? How does it “otherize” them? So—within this context—perhaps my initial reaction to this figure’s beauty was just my own messy feelings around “the ideal.” The layers of complexity in viewing and participating in Kahraman’s paintings make them all the more wonderful to look at!
You can check out “The Audience” and the two other paintings in this series—”The Celebrity” and “The Kurds”—at the Henry Art Gallery, where they are part of the group show, In Plain Sight. Peep the video below if you’re interested in seeing more of Kahraman’s process and work:
