Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Not Quite Human: Second Iteration, an exhibition of ten new paintings by Iraqi artist, Hayv Kahraman. This marks the artist's first solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias, London.

In this new 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. Yet 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 colonizer’s power, and calling attention to the dehumanisation of the colonized.

The figures are painted in these translucent flesh tones that, for me, create this almost transitory nature; there is a synthesis happening inbetween her body and the background. In certain areas in the flesh you can really see the blotches of paint sort of penetrating through her body, and sometimes I think of these marks as scars on her flesh. There is this sense of existing somewhere inbetween the foreground and the background, or maybe there is actually an undulating flow of being both here and there, simultaneously.

Kahraman, 2020