Hayv Kahraman
Back Fold, 2020
Oil on panel
190.5 x 114.3 cm
75 x 45 in
75 x 45 in
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In this body of work, Kahraman explores the transition that happens between a normative human and the Other. Depicting contortionists, her figures are placed in seemingly impossible poses, attracting the...
In this body of work, Kahraman explores the transition that happens between a normative human and the Other. Depicting contortionists, her figures are placed in seemingly impossible poses, attracting the voyeuristic gaze through an eroticisation and fetishisation of the Other.
The figures in Kahraman’s work challenge sexual and racial confinements. Using their bodies as a vehicle to question systemic structures of power, they seek to redefine their Otherness in their own terms. Their faces are undeterred; the gaze is tolerated. This interplay allows for the subjects to be both looked at and to ‘look back at’, subverting the coloniser’s power, and calling attention to the dehumanisation of the colonised. Kahraman practices a double vision, an interplay of returned gazes. She is voyeuristically prying into herself with the eyes of other people, yet also vindictively looks back disturbing the complacency of the same.
The figures in Kahraman’s work challenge sexual and racial confinements. Using their bodies as a vehicle to question systemic structures of power, they seek to redefine their Otherness in their own terms. Their faces are undeterred; the gaze is tolerated. This interplay allows for the subjects to be both looked at and to ‘look back at’, subverting the coloniser’s power, and calling attention to the dehumanisation of the colonised. Kahraman practices a double vision, an interplay of returned gazes. She is voyeuristically prying into herself with the eyes of other people, yet also vindictively looks back disturbing the complacency of the same.