The Eyes Have It: Hayv Kahraman Pairs Seduction and Surveillance at Seattle’s Frye Museum

Eyes are everywhere in “Look Me in the Eyes,” the exhibition of artist Hayv Kahraman’s painting, sculpture, and multimedia installations currently on view at the Frye Museum in Seattle: human eyes, detached from human bodies but popping out, fruit-like, on thin stalks of plants; eyes more dully tracking passersby from a trio of looming brick columns surveilling the gallery’s interior; eyes delicately rendered in watercolor but still piercingly directed toward viewers from the uneven textures of the irregularly woven flax fiber paper they are painted on; and eyes that seem to button up the translucent plastic sheets in a striking, free-standing chamber constructed for a multimedia installation.

Eyes are a long-standing motif for Kahraman, expressive of her experiences as a Kurdish Iraqi relocated to the United States by way of Sweden. Kahraman’s eyes reflect how refugees, both individuals and larger populations, are under constant scrutiny while, at the same time, often socially invisible. Crucially determining each outcome in both art and life, however, are the specific choices and nuances of how and where and in the company of what else the eyes are rendered in their different manifestations.

There’s something a bit unsettling in being surrounded by the gaze of so many uncanny representations of eyes. But there’s also something seductive about the other rich details in each artwork as settings for those eyes. Enticing, for instance, are the washes of marbleized painted backgrounds only partially filling the canvas surfaces, along with the exquisite, startling blues of eyes in smaller paintings such as 3eoon (2023) hovering on the surfaces of sensuous threads of woven flax.

Strangely alluring erotics also emanate from small groups of near-identical, scantily-clad women, of whose own eyes viewers can only see white swathes, as they lack iris or cornea. These blind-eyed figures populate Kahraman’s larger paintings while ravenously gathering and consuming big egg-like eyes off the plants from which they bloom—as in, for example, the grotesque but titillating buffet of Love Me, Love Me Not (2023). In all these larger paintings, the female forms congregate in close proximity to one another—questionable harems or girls-only cliques engaged in peculiar garden pursuits.

There are ambiguous signs between need and desire, on the one hand, or coercion, on the other, playing out through the many startling eye images on view in the human tableaux in these paintings. Are these creatures harvesting eyes to replace missing components for perception—given their own seemingly sightless white orbs? Is their consumption a decadent pleasure blindly embraced? Or is it the acceptance of some regime imposed on them as the only likely possibility for nourishment and survival? In one complicating iteration, the eyes in Eyeris (2023) are taken from the plant where they grow by three female figures as if to replace their own missing eyes, a scene further disturbing given the fact that the plant grows out of the blank eyes of a fourth figure laid out prone in the lap of another. This interweaving of different species, plant and animal, suggests uneasy relations between humans and other living things as resource possibility—a theme also played out in the painted flax series “Plant Life.”

Each work in “Plant Life” features broken-off stalks of flower bouquets (again, with eyes attached like berries to each plant), with each starkly held in place by a strip of medical tape. This intervention serves as an emblem of that scientific hubris that strives to define and master all creatures—oppressing by racial categorizations, in the case of human beings. Textural effects in this series are further teased by unraveled strands dangling off the main bodies of the canvases, intriguingly suggestive of something organic and still living themselves, as much or more so than the severed plants portrayed.

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Meanwhile, in Look me in the eyes 1-9 (2023), a suite of smaller square paintings, multiple sets of eyes reside and float above mask-like faces on which are also darkly stroked the prominent facial feature of single, thick brows overarching both eyes. There is the suggestion here of both a kind of ethnically specific bodily characteristic (channeling some of the artist’s own Middle Eastern background through a kind of self-portrait) as well as a tweak at too-superficial gender characterizations. Some of the placements of those unibrows in the series shift around on the larger field of the mask portraits while staying coupled with their companion sets of eyes to occupy a different spot lower down on some of the faces, as if transformed into flamboyant mustachios, hinting at gender-bending perceptions. Overall, these sparse portraits generate a comically surreal effect with undercurrents of a darker poignancy, especially with the occasional wistful addition of single arms and hand-grasping plant stalks that are painted in a stylized rich layer of golden gilt. And, again, these portrayals represent the thin stalks of plants as interconnected cross-species specimens from which human body parts seem to grow.

The installation Sizar (2023/2024) stands out in the show, an unnervingly constructed room within the gallery, with smoky-tinged vinyl walls suspended by four heavy-metal posts, generating a character half-inviting, half-claustrophobic. Like some kind of sci-fi vestibule—an airlock or laboratory clean room—this uncertain chamber adds to the sense of surveillance with a scolding, authoritative soundtrack playing from an overhead speaker, delivered as if to inmates in lockdown. And, as ever throughout the show, there are the eyes, dozens of them irregularly dotting in vertical lines up the middles of the plastic walls, markers of closure but also perpetually watching viewers who are themselves always exposed to view.

“Look Me in the Eyes” is at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum through February 2, 2025.