Hayv Kahraman’s Bodyscreens: Skin, Depth, and Surface
Abstract
Hayv Kahraman is most widely known for her large-scale paintings of pale women
with skin like silk and soft clouds of dark black hair. She often draws on her experiences as
an émigré from Iraq to represent the challenges that surface as a result of one’s identity.
Having observed in such works how the body is undermined by volatile abstractions like
nationality and gender, I will argue that in introducing the operation of a scanning device into
her practice, Kahraman comes to reconfigure these terms through what Christine Ross has
termed “precarious visuality.” Destabilizing optical perspective requires that the interface of
the viewing experience be reshaped, and seeing the female body threatened by a loss of
agency, Kahraman reconsiders its very surface, turning body into a screen. This thesis will
therefore examine what I will call “bodyscreens” made by Kahraman. The first chapter will
argue that in meditating on surface and body, the artist is revising minimalist practices, such
as those of Robert Morris, which confront the viewer with objects that emphasize their
exteriority. In asking why Kahraman chooses to represent the body as a minimalist object
with Icosahedral Body and Quasi-Corporeal, I will rely on the philosophy of Elizabeth
Grosz to demonstrate that by inscribing her internal body on an object’s skin, the artist is
showing that as a screen, the body’s significance can permute, dismantle hierarchies, resist
categories, and expand the possibilities of subjectivity. The second chapter will discuss how
this melding of inner and outer is also an explicit engagement with architectural spaces.
Kahraman links together memories of mashrabiya screens; the category of sexuality; and the
viewer’s immersion in architecture to produce what Giuliana Bruno describes as what can be
called filmic spaces. This intersection of traditional Islamic media with the ongoing
redefinitions of the screen in museographic spaces establishes new forms of dwelling and
journey that contrast with the colonizer’s desire to enclose and fix. I will conclude by
discussing Kahraman’s performance art and ask what relationship between evasion of
identification and intersubjectivity she proposes in projecting her story onto the bodies of her
actresses.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Havy Kahrman's geometric bodied and minimal art -- The filmic body as a new site of dwelling -- Self-effacement and intersubjectivity across Kahraman's bodyscreens -- Illustrations
Degree
MA (Master of Arts)
Thesis Department
Rights
Open Access (fully available)
Copyright retained by author