In the center of Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, lies a sound booth of sorts. Surrounded on three sides by a taut, semi-opaque synthetic skin, a speaker dangles from the ceiling and plays a woman’s measured, assertive voice on a 22-minute loop. It’s from a tape Kahraman’s mother sent to Swedish immigration authorities over a quarter century ago: a rejection of their rejection of her family’s asylum application.
The piece is called Sizar, and it is the oldest material in her exhibition, “Look Me in the Eyes.” In the audio, her mother, Sizar Barzendji, invites Swedish immigration authorities to cut into her skin, take DNA samples, and look at her cells to verify her identity. She asserts that she is “not a cockroach to be stepped on” or denied or erased.
Born in Baghdad, Kahraman fled Iraq during the Gulf War when she was 11 years old. She and her family landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport following a month-and-a-half-long journey organized by a paid smuggler. Upon arrival, Kahraman’s mother instructed them to flush their fake Danish passports down airport toilets, beginning a yearslong challenge to secure asylum in Sweden as (literally) undocumented refugees. Swedish authorities declined her family’s application after five years, stating that their story and identity could not be verified. Their application was ultimately approved.
Through a range of artforms and media, the exhibit consistently rejects the surveillance, ecocide, and dispossession defining how and why millions of people seek asylum worldwide.
Take Sizar’s walls: Made of mylar, the booth’s surface resembles marble. Kahraman encountered the pattern during recent studies of Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century scientist from Sweden who established modern taxonomy and remains a source of national pride there. After reading a blog post criticizing Linnaeus due to the devastating effects 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 copy of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus from 1737. The book’s endpages were decorated using a technique called “marbling.”
Interested in the book’s contents as well as its marbled design, Kahraman revisited Turkish artists who use the nearly-millennium-old artistic technique; she started experimenting with the artform herself—splattering paint onto water mixed with carrageenan, a seaweed-based thickening agent, all held in a five-by-ten-foot tray, and then dipping canvases into the pigmented fluid. How this process looks in its final form—the three-dimensional swirls of colored water transplanted onto the planar surface of canvas—is inherently random and uncontrollable, governed far more by fluid mechanics than artistic intervention (save for the occasional stir or blow on the water to herd the diffusing paint just so).
Kahraman says marbling’s aleatory nature is curative; her systematic approach to work and her desire for control are, in her eyes, tied to experiences as a refugee and marginalized person in Sweden. “If I made a mistake, it would mean that I would get deported … this is the thought process that went through my mind [in Sweden],” she says. “Imagine having to let go of that fear of making mistakes and really embracing the glitch, the error. It was very therapeutic.”
Marbling patterns undulate across the four rooms holding Kahraman’s work at the Frye, albeit deployed for a range of purposes. For Brick Palm, onyx-colored marbling gives a trio of towering stacked bricks the charred look of burnt and dead trees, an homage to the millions of palm trees that have died over the course of many wars in Iraq, yet remain physically erect because of the strength of their root systems.
Meanwhile, in Eyeris, a large-format painting situated in the exhibit’s first room, greyscale billows of marbled linen creep from the top left and bottom right of the canvas, offering austere surroundings for the four women in the painting’s center, all of whom resemble Kahraman but lack irises. One of the women is lifeless and a plant sprouts from her eyes; irised eyes dangle from the tips of the plant where blossoms should be. One woman reaches out toward the eye-blossoms, while another prepares to place an irised eye on top of her own like a contact lens.
Kahraman dubs her pseudo-cyborgian flora her “‘fuck you’ plants”—rebuking the Linnean worldview. Her iris-less subjects are a nod to the techniques some refugees deploy to subvert and refuse surveillance. She says her painted subjects aim to say, “I know you’re looking at me, but you don’t get to look at me. You don’t get to scan me. You don’t get to pin me down like a pressed plant.”
At the base of Sizar’s trusses, Kahraman includes grains of silicon carbide, a crystal resembling sand used in ballistic vests and sandpaper, once again pointing to the forms of self-erasure that are sometimes necessary for people seeking asylum. (Asylees will sometimes remove their fingerprints with sandpaper or acid.) The booth’s sandlike base as well as its mylar envelope symbolize refugees’ claim to their right to opacity—including her mother’s vocal insistence upon that right.
Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in late 2018, and she passed away in July 2020. Unsurprisingly, the marbling for Sizar is unlike the others. Kahraman avoided swirling the paint as it floated in water so that the globs retained their cellular resemblance. Grieving her mother’s loss, Kahraman says she struggled to find the right balance between the “personal” and the “political.” In particular, she hesitated listening to her mother’s 22-minute tape to Swedish authorities, though she knew the recording could help her recover memories of her life as a refugee and stake political claims through art. The final process of that work, pouring sand-like crystals into Sizar’s trusses during installation at the Frye, ultimately felt “ritualistic” to Kahraman.
“This is an altar for my mother,” she says. “The personal is political, and I utterly believe that the political is personal, all of it, but a part of me was a little afraid … I was afraid that if I were to include her voice, it would just be about her voice. But it’s not. It’s not only her voice. It’s the voice of millions of people.”
Look Me in the Eyes is on view at the Frye Art Museum (704 Terry Ave, Seattle) through February 2, 2025. Free admission.
