1

Madina Tlostanova

Bending and torqueing into a “willful subject”

In her new project Hayv Kahraman documents a process of transformation of an obedient object
into a mischievous “willful subject” 1. The space of this metamorphosis is the body that ceases to
be a silent emblem of its own suffering, to become a site of agency and empowerment, a
decolonial “killjoy” who breaks out of the system of paralyzing oppositions that still define our
lives: man/woman, white/colored, human/natural, home/exile. The artist ventures into a liminal
sphere exposing the basest sides of human nature such as lust or enjoyment from someone else’s
physical pain. It is a sphere alluring for male artists of the previous, less politically correct
époques when circus acrobats, ballerinas, snake charmers, exotic Oriental dancers and other
risqué inhabitants of amusement parks, side-shows, human zoos and dime museums whetted
Euro-American hetero-patriarchal voyeuristic appetites. In the last decades this problematic has
been multiply ridiculed and debunked by many women artists, particularly in postcolonial and
antiracist contexts. Yet Kahraman’s take on this issue is complexly contradictory and relational
as she is equally interested in contemplating the audiences’ affects and the performer’s growing
self-awareness.

All of her works are ultimately reflections on otherness and othering as a form of
dehumanization, focusing on the gap between the immigrant, non-white, genderly marked other
and the way she is perceived by the white hetero-patriarchal normative same. The art of
contortion2 selected as the main metaphor of this series, is a liminal space per se. In its
euromodern commodified form it belongs to the forbidden realm of freak shows with their
typical temporary cancellation of decency prescriptions for the white male subject. The audience
of the freak show does not identify itself with the freak but on the contrary, rejoices in its own
normality even if it is thrilled with a temporary seduction into/by the abnormal, the sexualized
taboo. Ann McClintock described this effect as “involving the fetishistic principle of collection
and display and the figure of panoramic time as commodity spectacle” 3. Stretching the
boundaries of normativity it accentuates such forms of othering as exoticization, fetishization
and dehumanizing eroticism4.

One of the main conceptual and affective elements of this series is its ambivalence, the interplay
of the opposite meanings within one image. Such are the haunting bodily pyramids interweaving
the elements of identical bodies and differently-expressioned faces, gathering into monstrous
multiple selves. The bodies are positioned in a sexually provocative and extremely submissive
and humiliating way yet at the same time, are decidedly powerful and threatening 5, triggering
1
Ahmed S. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
2
In contrast with the euromodern understanding of contortion as a commodity spectacle, in a number of non-
Western cultures this art was not regarded as a mere craft retaining its links with the superhuman and the
supernatural. Examples include Moroccan acrobats and Mongolian tradition of contortion that existed before and
parallel to the European commercial circuses.
3
McClintock A. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York and London:
Routledge, 1995, p. 123.
4
The interplay of human and other-than-human is a central element of contortion up to a special genre of golliwog
where contortionists are treated as if they were ragdolls.
5
This strange effect is intensified by the persistent drawing of attention to primary and secondary sexual
characteristics (vaginas, lips, nipples) which is particularly evident in the case of abstract “sculptures” where
contortionists are simply taken to their dehumanized sexual function, presented almost as machines for pleasure.
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the mixture of the desire and fear of the other 6. True to the actual standard poses of contortion
artists, they simultaneously mock the conventional porno aesthetics folding the woman in a
particular way or, in a more extreme BDSM version, painfully stretching her limbs, and remind
of the Indian miniatures depicting multi-limbed and many-headed fearsome deities. Thus the
exotic and the animal merge in these peculiar erotic monsters7.

Kahraman focuses on the dynamics of (in)visibility and hyper-visibility as an effective modern

mechanism of exclusion. Classified as belonging to nature rather than humanity, indigenous,
colonized people or refugees today are naturally visible yet publicly invisible, exempt from any
political space or the “space of appearance” 8, subject to a worn-out set of stereotypical scenarios
(Orientalist demonization or exoticization, forced assimilation and progressivism). So is the
protagonist of Kahraman’s series: she is not a woman, but a set of twists. She is invisible as a
human being yet hyper-visible as a spectacle. She is devoid of her woman’s identity while being
taken exclusively to a sexual function - a femininity of an animal/monster. Thus Kahraman
questions the standard small repertoire of stereotypes assigned to the non-Western woman (sex
toy, nurse, labor force) that she is not allowed to transcend or even enrich with the stereotypes of
the White privileged women (Madonna). This eroticized other has sex (as a purely biological
quality) but no gender (as a cultural and social characteristic). She is regarded not as a woman
but as a female animal, an anthropos, not a humanitas9. She then can trigger no human
compassion, no identification or affinity, only disgust, lust or a cold curiosity of a freak show
frequenter, a morbid fetishization of the suffering body rendered purely biological.

Throughout the series Kahraman accentuates the dissonance between the body and the face
which is intensified through introducing the element of ethnic-racial difference between the
conventional white body and the non-white face (also marked by recognizable signs such as the
signature accrete eyebrows and sexually suggestive peculiarly shaped lips). While the body is
busy performing its sensational tricks, the clever contemplating face that we recognize from
other Kahraman’s works, mostly remains impassive and impenetrable, at times betraying latent
pain and agony that have nothing to do with the actual physical bending. Staring directly at the
audience with their Renaissance inspired eyes, these faces represent a variety of emotions
ranging from a blank somnambulist expression to a sly, playful and teasing trickster’s gaze.
Moreover, they regain their right to look 10 and to return the gaze of the Western visual subject,
thus disrupting its dominance and control.

Therefore 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

The abstract forms in their curves and bends, in their frozen dynamic, repeat the movement and tension of the
human bodies.
6
Bhabha H. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 44-45.
7
The personal touch is ambivalent as well: as a child Kahraman attended ballet classes in Baghdad and as a result of
excessive stretching acquired the ability to dislocate her joints that she later used to entertain her friends. It is ironic
that she was learning a typically western art of ballet in Baghdad as a rich transcultural space of non-homogenous
multiple identifications. But once she moved to Europe her opportunities for self-realization immediately shrunk, as
she was shifted automatically to a role of an exotic other and started using the “freakish” skill, learned thanks to a
western art, as her signature exotic and frightening ability.
8
Arendt H. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp.198-199.
9
Nishitani O. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of Human Being.” Translation, Biopolitics,
Colonial Difference. Eds. N. Sakai and J. Solomon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006, P. 259-273.
10
Mirzoeff N. The Right to Look: A Counter-history of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
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disturbing the complacency of the same. She is testing the power of the seductive object
debunking the habitual silent victim stereotype typical for the representation of non-white
immigrant women. The artist creates a specific optics of (self)representation communicating the
feeling of exclusion and non-being and, at the same time, a powerful impulse of remaking
oneself anew and delinking from legitimized ways of visual perception. This stance is quite
frightening for the confused white hetero-patriarchal subject unused to encounter power and
agency in the other and prevented from practicing his habitual charity and civilizing mission.

The series is built on the overall parallelism of the physical pain or numbness left after the bodies
were trained not to feel the pain, and the acute constant pain of the lost “self” that is much harder
to numb. An important part of one’s self is lost in the process of outsmarting the authority and
mimicking its norms. The play on identities used as a survival technique ultimately destabilizes
the sense of integrity, so that the subject is unable anymore to say who and what she is. The not-
quite-human then balances on the verge of the not yet born or already dismembered. Hence the
persistent accents on rootlessness, confusion, estrangement, disidentification or even
depersonalization. The paradigmatic non-belonging is by no means a happy state yet it enriches
the vision and provides the tools for the future “re-existence”11.

Above all this series documents the metamorphoses of a trickster in its rather rare feminine form.
Trickery as a traditional weapon of the weak becomes empowering, turning the trickster into a
willful subject who feels at home in an alluring and threatening liminal space. Kahraman’s
tricksters are boundary crossers and border dwellers. They are disrupting the rigid dichotomy of
obedient assimilation and open revolt, through living out an alternative of ambiguous subversion,
exotic-erotic seduction, manipulating and mocking, utilizing the distorted “master’s tools” 12 to
their benefit, eventually causing the power to crumble.

This trickster maintains a connection with traditional tricksters of many mythologies such as
half-gods, anthropomorphic animals, humans with supernatural characteristics. Surviving the
dangers of the world using trickery and deceit and disobeying normative rules, are the most
important characteristics of these cunning insurgents outsmarting the forces of power and
destabilizing conventionality, overcoming the dilemmas of the people whose humanity is under
suspicion and whose bodies act as powerful markers of difference.

One of the main trickster’s tricks is disguise which can at times come to a shape-changing. In
Kahraman’s contortionists, this mutability is embodied literally as the trickster’s modus vivendi
and a way of survival and re-existence. Yet as in all Kahraman’s works there is an additional
hidden motif linking tricksterism to her traumatic experience of the war in Iraq, to its disfigured
and dismembered mine victims, so that bricolage becomes an almost literal and physical magic
act of stitching one’s body together from many discarded and mismatched parts. The trace of this
painful local history is ever present in the agonizing facial expressions and distorted postures of
contortionists. It is the artist’s way of exposing the colonial wound 13 and attempting to heal it,
however impossible this task may be, through the punishing and avenging incarnation of the
trickster.
11
Albán Achinte A. “Artistas Indígenas y Afrocolombianos: Entre las Memorias y las Cosmovisiones. Estéticas de
la Re-Existencia”. Arte y Estética en la Encrucijada Descolonial. Buenos Aires: Del Siglo, 2009, pp. 83-112.
12
Lorde A. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The
Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 110–13.
13
Anzaldúa G. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute 1999, p. 25.
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The dynamics of Kahraman’s technique also reflects different stages of metamorphosis. It is

expressed in the gradual shift from more “realistic” Renaissance-style depictions to increasingly
non-representational and even abstract ones. This effect is reached through the use of blurred and
half-transparent vanishing figures with eroded boundaries. Depicting different stages of
transformation with the help of the increased transparency and blurriness, the use of toning,
hazing, gradation, sfumato, Kahraman goes further and further away from the canonical
euromodern depiction of the normative white body, and more and more confidently shaping her
own language delinked from the master’s tools.

The half-transparent figures often merge with each other and with non-corporeal elements of
these paintings, namely with the recurrent tessellated geometrical patterns. These maze-like
patterns decorate the contortionists’ leotards, organize, with their monotonous orderly
ornaments, the paintings’ otherwise dynamic and untamable space and even the restless minds of
the protagonists as in several works the patterns are symbolically overlaid on women’s heads.
Above all, the Muslim patterns in dissonance with the Renaissance corporeal aesthetics, provide
a symbolic link with the artist’s native culture, her private protected imagined space. In a number
of works the human figures themselves become increasingly ornamental and non-figurative
folding into intricate patterns and questioning the habitual disregard of the ornament in
contemporary aesthetic canon as an old-fashioned handicraft genre. This effect is intensified by
the increasingly unusual and estranging foreshortening dehumanizing the acrobats into almost
abstract corporeal monstrous patterns.

Problem people are mostly balancing on the verge of physical survival and losing control over
anything including their bodies as the last refuges of resistance. When people have no control
over anything, the last space of confrontation is the body 14. Yet it is also the first trigger of
liberation, transgression and re-existence as any awareness starts with the body as the first
instrument we are given to make sense of the world. The non-white body is systematically
represented as abnormal, a subject of secret self-abhorrence in need of “white-washing”.
Through its rehabilitation and symbolic empowerment Kahraman attempts a decolonial catharsis.
This non-normative body is as ambivalent as Dubois’s “double consciousness” 15. It incorporates
the pain and its overcoming, the submission and resistance to it, the humiliation and reinstating
of one’s dignity. In the end the bodies of Kahraman’s contortionists serve as powerful material
mediators of resistance and re-existence, empowering independent actors who could rephrase the
Fanonian prayer: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” 16 into “O my body,
help me question the mastery that is leaving us no chances, and create myself and the world
anew!”

14
Gordon L. “Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence,” Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. Lewis Gordon, Sharpley-
Whiting T. Denean, and Renee T. White. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pp. 297-308.
15
Du Bois W. B. The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1903.
16
Fanon F. Black Skin. White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967, p. 232.