Eye Contact: the Assertion of Identity in "Look Me in the Eyes"
Review of Look Me in the Eyes at The Frye Art Museum
Written by Teen Editorial Staff member SYLVIE JARMAN and edited by Teen Editorial Staff member KAYLEE YU
Eyes are always present in Hayv Kahraman’s work. The viewer is confronted as the walls of the Frye Art Gallery stare back at them: contorted figures with empty scleras and plants sprouting eyes as if they were fruits all gaze attentively at attendants of Kahraman’s exhibit Look Me in the Eyes. Kahraman’s work is heavily autobiographical, drawing from her experiences as an Iraqi refugee in Sweden and incorporating the isolation, dehumanization, and perpetual surveillance she endured as an immigrant. Look Me in the Eyes makes the viewer feel as Kahraman felt; watched, scrutinized, and standing opposite a wall of unfeeling onlookers. While one might assume this makes for an uncomfortable gallery experience, Kahraman’s undeniable artistry, sincere emotional honesty, and control over her themes formed an enrapturing exhibit.
Look Me in the Eyes sprawls across three rooms of the Frye’s gallery, walls lined with Kahraman’s portraits of distorted, blank-eyed women. These figures huddle together and grasp for branches pullulating with eyes and mouths, an attempt to reassemble themselves by claiming the irises and bright lips they lack. Her paintings are countered by large sculptures utilizing industrial materials like brick and metal beams.
The displays in Look Me in the Eyes are often organized asymmetrically, and the exhibit’s eponymous series exemplifies this method of presentation. Rather than being placed in a line by number, they are hung sporadically above and below one another with arbitrary distances between them, reminiscent of parlor-style galleries. This display confronts the viewer with negative space, evoking the sense of isolation and discomfort which pervades much of Kahraman’s work. Though this manner of display suits the themes of the exhibit well, it often interrupts the flow of the gallery. It prevents meaningful connections between the featured works due to the literal and metaphorical distance that is forced between them.
Despite this, Kahraman’s depiction of nature and plant life still grounds the exhibit and creates a common thread amongst the featured works. She portrays her botanical subjects as vibrant and lush. They are painted with delicate, deliberate brush strokes, giving them a very lifelike quality. It offsets the feeling of desolation present throughout the gallery, like ivy overtaking an abandoned building. Kahraman’s appreciation for nature is especially seen in her treatment of her canvases. Much of her work is done on linen, and there is a translucence to her brushwork that allows the linen’s fibrous texture to remain visible, giving a very naturalistic feeling to many pieces. This is even more prominent in her flax fiber works, with pieces like Berbeen and Qazwan untrimmed and fraying at the edges, evoking roots or hanging vines.
The grounded realism of the painted flora and the earthy feeling of the canvases contrasts the dream-like sensation many of the paintings have: the strange, identical eyeless woman, the ethereal marbled backgrounds that evoke smoggy skies or oil spills. Both elements–the real and the surreal–fully express the themes of Kahraman’s work.
The botanical focus of Kahraman’s art is rooted in the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovations in the field of botany were marked with his closely held colonial and religious prejudices. These beliefs were adopted in the wider field of botany, threatening indigenous flora across the world.
Here, the symbolic significance of Kahraman’s botanical studies emerges; the plants that she depicts are all deeply culturally significant, but were subject to Linnaeus’ Eurocentric plant classifications. Kahraman asserts her Iraqi and Kurdish background, coming against colonialism and oppression through depictions of flourishing indigenous flora–a reclamation of identity through a connection to nature.
With the range of complex themes and ideas the exhibition covers, there are points in which it feels over-encumbered. This dampens the impact of certain works. Sizar, one of the two featured installations, is a highly conceptual piece; marbled silk screens are suspended from large metal scaffolding, creating an open box for the viewer to step into. Inside this constructed enclave, a recording of Kahraman’s mother pleading her case for asylum to the Swedish government plays from a speaker hanging from the ceiling. This is by far the most deeply personal piece in the gallery, direct evidence of the pains that Kahraman and her family underwent as refugees. The piece itself is astounding, but the orientation of the gallery ends up undercutting it. Sizar is opposite several of Kahraman’s more floral pieces, like Lip Plants and her flax fiber series. The contrast between the cold, industrial feeling of Sizar and these pieces is jarring in a way that feels haphazard and clashes with the rest of the gallery.
The same can be said of Brick Palms, the other main installation. It consists of three brick towers meant to evoke trees which are painted with the reoccuring marbled technique. The piece is symbolically rich, speaking to the fear that nature will be overtaken by rampant industrialization. However, it is disserviced by the awkward placement at the very end of the gallery, viewed only as you leave. This makes the piece feel like an afterthought despite its pertinence to the overarching theme of the show. If the installations were placed with the same clear intentionality present through the rest of the show, the exhibit would have been truly perfect.
Meeting the eyes of one of Kahraman’s paintings elicits an odd sensation. With other works of portraiture, making eye contact with the subject feels static: it doesn’t feel like you’re catching someone else’s eyesight, because truthfully, you aren’t. In Look Me in the Eyes, with each passing painting, the gaze of eyes on the walls feels more real. Kahraman’s soul-bearing emotional honesty and masterful portrayal of complex emotions breathes life into her paintings. When you make eye contact with her subjects–whether one of the women, the plants, or the disembodied eyes throughout–it feels like you are meeting the eyes of something living, desperate, and emotional. Look Me in the Eyes thrives in its viewer’s discomfort–something I have never felt in an art gallery before–and thus creates a truly immersive, enthralling experience.
Lead photo: Hayv Kahraman. Love Me Love Me Not, 2023. Oil and acrylic on linen. 80 x 100 in.Courtesy of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Photo: Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. Glen Cheriton, Impart Photography
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