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JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

LET THE GUEST BE THE MASTER: BORDER THINKING AND THE AESTHETIC POTENTIAL OF MIGRANT
CONSCIOUSNESS.
Walter D. Mignolo

ART AND MIGRANT CONSCIOUSNESS

Behind the exhibit Let the Guest be the Master is a dramatic personal and collective history that Hayv Kahraman has
narrated in several of her previous artistic works. Kahraman’s personal story takes us through her passion for
geometry, space, time and the body. It also takes us through the memories of her ten years living in Iraq, whose
destiny has oscillated between the totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein and the tragedy of US imperial intervention.
Kahraman’s anguish and her anger are nourished by the suffering of people in Iraq as is expressed through the
women in her paintings.

Kahraman’s artistic work is channeled through four trajectories. One is the visual originality of colors and shapes that
fill her paintings. Another is her familiarity with Japanese, Persian, Arab and European Renaissance visual imagery.
The third is a fascination with Western art history, geometry and medicine. The last trajectory injects her work with a
force that transcends the former: her familiarity with non-Western visual cultures and memories inscribed in her own
body. Kahraman’s artwork enacts a shift that is at once geo-cultural and body-political.

Her paintings bring the past into the present, the silent into the audible, the invisible into the visible, and by so doing
not only is she is reducing Kant’s aesthetic regulations and Botticelli’s paradigmatic Renaissance women to size but
also revealing, through them, the regional scope of these Western standards. Both, philosophical aesthetics and
Renaissance women are fictional entities regulating taste and projecting regional geniuses to universality. No longer.

Modern Western aesthetics, philosophically (Kant and his postmodern and altermodern aftermath) and visually
(Botticelli and the visual legacy of European Renaissance), controls subjectivities and subject formation. Kahraman’s
work emanates from the need to start from this point, since it is unavoidable, in order to depart from its limiting and
repressive protocols. Her work delinks from modern, postmodern and altermodern aesthetic normativity and from the
canonized visual images of white-skinned and blonde/red-haired naked women in Renaissance painting. Her work
liberates aesthesis (sensing, perceptions) from the prison house of Western aesthetics.

Kahraman’s work dignifies migrant consciousness and by so doing so empowers the sensibility of millions of colored
migrants into white land territories. Delinking is achieved by appropriating Western artistic techniques and
technologies and using them as weapon not only as resistance but, above all, as re-existence. 1

Migrant consciousness feeds Kahraman’s visual and verbal imagery. As a migrant you do not just cross borders: you
dwell in the border always. Borders remain in your body all your life. It is up to you to repress and assimilate or to
claim the dignity of what you are, as migrant. In the immigrant land, you are a foreigner. In the land from where you
migrated, you are no longer like your people. The migrant consciousness that Kahraman’s work embodies is similar
to what W.E.B Dubois named ‘double consciousness’: how can one be ‘Black’ and ‘American’ at the same time.
‘Blackness’ did not have the same status as ‘American’.

Dark-skinned people from the Middle East do not have the same status in the modern/colonial fictional imagery as
the white-skinned Europeans or Anglo-Americans who invented the fiction. The kind of migrant consciousness that
Kahraman embodies is not similar to a German migrant to Benelux or Scandinavian countries. It is neither the same
consciousness of a French women migrating to Algeria. It is the consciousness that shapes subjectivities of migrants
from the variegated diversity moving from the non-European world to Western Europe and the US: from Iraq to
Sweden, Italy and the US.

1
The expression comes from Afro-Colombian artists and activist, Adolfo Albán Achinte, artista anc activist from Popayan, Colombia,
http://201.234.78.173:8081/cvlac/visualizador/generarCurriculoCv.do?cod_rh=0000872512
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The body is imprinted sociogenetically 2 with the gaze of racial and gender divides: one’s identity is not something
that he carries someplace deep in his person. On the contrary, it emerges from his awareness of being seen, rather
than from some inner self. Migrant consciousness emerges from our awareness of being seen as lesser. In
Kahraman’s house you are the guest. But you could be native or migrant. Dwelling in the territory or in the border will
shape your response to “Let the guest be the master” (a familiar hospitality saying and doing in the Arab world).

Contrary to the explorations of forms, shapes and spaces from artists whose personal histories are embedded in the
mono-culture of Western histories, migrants and those migrants who are also refugee, have a double history and
memory: one that cannot be erased – the lived memories of education through birth and family, and one that has to
be learned – the history that is inscribed in the bodies and territories where we migrate; a history that we learn but we
do not embody.

DISOBEYING WESTERN AESTHETICS

When looking back at the paintings of European masters, Kahraman has said that she concentrates on the
techniques and blocks out the meaning. She “steals” and uses what she has learned by observing the materiality of
Western painting. By so doing, Kahraman makes visible what Western aesthetics hid, silenced or disavowed.Stealing
and using techniques and repurposing them is not new: Greek thinkers translated into Arabic by the 12th and 13th
centuries, were “stolen” by Western Christian lettered men for their own purposes.

Technique and technology are weapons in Kahraman’s hands and eyes for rebuilding an identity that she, as migrant,
was supposed to despise. The result is visual disobedience. 3 Eurocentric art history is discontinued in Kahraman’s
work. There is a shift in the cartography of seeing rather than imitation; there is enactment of the disavowed rather
than representation of the “oriental” known; there is unapologetic self-affirmation rather than begging for recognition.
Kahraman’s recognition in the art world comes, precisely, from her artistic disobedience – not following the routes that
one is expected to follow – rather than for her surrendering to modern, postmodern or altermodern expectations.

Visual disobedience is manifested in one of the elements connecting the five large-scale paintings on wood panel
based on floor plans of houses in Baghdad and the four paintings identified by the names of geometric figures. The
common element is the woman whose body is shaped after Kahraman’s 3D scanning of her own body. That is why
we see the body in the painting crossed by spatial geometric shapes that have been flattened. Furthermore, the
cross-sections of her body manifest themselves in curved geometric shapes that disobey the regulations of Western
geometric tradition: the platonic solid.

Kahraman appropriates modern technology and Western geometric tradition and uses them as weapons against their
unintended mono-cultural universalism. Her work is a powerful non-verbal instrument of expression, and why not use
it if it can be a catalyst for de-colonial changes legitimizing migrant consciousness? De-colonial changes mean not
only denouncing patriarchy in Muslim societies but patriarchy in general, including its Western version, through the
experience of Muslim societies. By so doing, Kahraman is suggesting that Western feminism doesn’t have the key to
patriarchal critique and, above all, she is denouncing the fictional universalism legitimized by Western feminist
standards.

What matters in Kahraman’s work is not what you see but the subject and the subjectivity that informs what you see.
That is why Kahraman’s art does not “represent” Middle Eastern culture and people. On the contrary, it is an elegant
and angered statement that confronts patriarchal privileges (both Middle Eastern and Western) and hegemonic visual
cultures. Botticelli becomes, in Kahraman’s work, one among many (Japanese, Persian, Arabic) visual references.
Her work brings together art, disobedient beauty and activism.

If then current conceptions of beauty were shaped by Western education, Kahraman’s work is nothing less than a
statement in the global processes of de-Westernizing hegemonic concepts of beauty. Beauty, like many equivalent
basic human experiences, cannot be universally regulated. If then Western mainstream and a common sense
concept of beauty were projected to regulate non-European colonized societies, then Kahraman’s work is not only
de-Westernizing art and aesthetic but it also confronts and delinks from the relentless paws of coloniality. 4

2
The expression comes from Frantz Fanon, Martinican thinker, psychologist and activist, Peau Noire, Masques Blanques, Paris,
1952.
3
This expression comes from Kency Cornejo, (Ph Student, art historian and activist from Central América) Department of Art
History and Visual Culture, Duke University.
4
Coloniality shall not be confused with colonialism. Colonialism refers to specific colonial historical formations, since the European
renaissance. Coloniality is the logic that underlines all Western forms of colonialism since then. Coloniality doesn´t need colonies to
work. It works through finances, media, education and cultural formations.
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COMMODITIES: ART AND THE FEMALE BODY

The power of the shift consists in making explicit the implicit. Female bodies in contemporary Western societies, as
well as in economically emerging Eastern societies, are commodities for male consumption. A well-known fact, it is
not an issue brought to the open in contemporary art. At the same time, it is well known that art has increasingly
become a commodity rather than a valuable cultural object that could be purchased to mark the distinction of the
owner, be it a wealthy person or a private or national museum. The value of art is the value of money. Kahraman’s
installation is throwing these familiar secrets into your face:

I’m a commodity. My paintings are a commodity. My figures are a commodity. I pose in the nude
and photograph my body to use as outlines for paintings. My figures then are visual transitions of my own
body. They are buying my body. The figures are rendered to fit the occidental pleasures. White flesh.
Transparent flesh. Posing in compositions directly taken from the Renaissance. Conforming to what they
think is ideal. Neglecting everything else. Colonizing my own body to then be displayed gracefully into my
rectangular panels. Carnal and visceral palpability. I provide for you in my rectangles. I know you like it.
That’s why I paint it. To catch your gaze. To activate your gaze, I want you to buy me so you can look at me
all day long. I’m your little oriental pussycat. You can pet me I don’t bite.5

By making explicit that she and her art are commodities, Kahraman puts us, the guests and viewers, in the
uncomfortable situation of looking at her and her art for sale, while at the same time understanding that by putting
herself and her art for sale, she is denouncing the hypocrisy of empty humanitarian statements recognizing that
women and men are equal, and the hypocrisy of thinking that art brings as only beauty and spirituality.

Kahraman reveals the rule of the game that most of us know, but we don’t talk about. The tension she creates
between “women as human and art as beauty” and “women as commodity and art as commodity” is a slap on our
face. Kahraman’s artistic activism comes through sophisticated visual composition and forceful verbal statement. The
political force comes through the technical sophistication rather than a blunt realistic depiction of women oppressions
and social injustices.

Kahraman’s brown-skinned nude women blend with the brown of the wood, proudly stamping part of the global
imagery that the Renaissance scholars described as the outside regions (today underdeveloped, emerging or rough
states), and people that had to be brought into civilization and modernity. With Kahraman’s work we no longer need
to be saved, to be civilized or to be brought into the fiction of Western modernity and its aftermaths.

This connection brings to mind Botticelli’s blonde/red-haired and white-skinned nudes stamping the gender imagery
of the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli (a European native artist, white-skinned and red-haired himself) has his place in
the history of European art and in the global expansion of Europe imperial culture, but now Botticelli and Western art
are being reduced to size by the depiction of a dark-skinned and black-haired female created by a migrant female
artist.

THE HOUSE AND THE COURTYARD: THE AESTHETIC POTENTIAL OF MIGRANT CONSCIOUSNESS AND
BORDER THINKING

Ghost-like women are floating. They are undressed but not naked. Body and material construction blend, they
become one – the spirit of the house. The prominence of the courtyard, particularly in Five Court Compound
underlines its two crucial functions. On the one hand, it is a border space between the outside, the street, and the
inside, the house. The compositions invite us – guest – to enter a space that is alien to most of us in New York.

However, on the other hand, it is a place marked by power differentials – the place were gender roles are divided.
Males meet in the courtyard and women remain inside the house. In a complex structure of dependent human
relations, women are in Kahraman’s art, the house. They can observe, without being observed, the courtyard from
behind the Mashrabiya, the screen that divides two rooms in Kahraman’s installation.

The house is my domain. When you enter you will resign and obey. At least that’s what I
have to believe if I were to survive. Indeed you can have the rest but these rooms, these
kitchens, these balconies, these toilettes are mine. They are an extension of myself. And
within the confines of these walls I will do what I please. I will watch you from above.
Through the screens I can see everything you do and you won’t even know that I’m
watching. I will laugh when you stumble and I will hear your conversations with others.

5
Hayv Kahraman, unpublished ms.
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 You will not see me because you can’t handle seeing me. I am too seductive. My black
hair, my skin. I am behind these walls. Tamed and constrained. Yet this is my domain. 6

You, being the guest, are now the master but, as master, you are being observed by someone behind the
Mashrabiya.

If the floor plans of these Baghdad houses provide the delineation of space, they also provide the geographical and
historical locations where memories dwell. The floating women blending into the walls we can see in the four
paintings in the smaller galleries. You have access to the room in which two of these paintings hang, however you
cannot enter the room that holds the other two paintings. You can only pick at them through the Mashrabiya. You
have become a voyeur.

Migrant consciousness has two sides: one determined by the place you arrived and the other by place you have left
behind. It is painful and at the same time it provides the creative impetus that links the politics of art, the colonial
wound. Kahraman’s work speaks out not only about displacement but also confronting the dominant view about “us”
and “them.” Her work is a constant and political interrogation of the puzzle of her life rather than passive
representation:

Having fled Iraq during war I’m constantly faced with the fact that I am not in the country
of my origin, and while I live a safe and pleasant life in the west my fellow countryman and
women suffer from unspeakable wars and injustices. As a result I’ve inherited an appetite
for rebellion that exclusively takes form in my work. 7

In this sense, “Let the Guest be the Master” brings forward a potent shift in the cartography of sensing, believing and
seeing. Transplanted from everyday life to an artistic enactment cross-culturally political, the master whose
dominance allows him to invite, loses his privilege in the new context. The installation sets the stage for a double
gaze: the presence of the Mashrabiyas dividing two small rooms, one of them not accessible to the guests, reminds
us, guest, we are placed in the situation of the women observing the males in the courtyard.

But at the same time, “Let the Guest be the Master” is Kahraman’s response to racial and patriarchal crossing gazes
(the gaze that discriminate and the gaze of the discriminated), in everyday life as well as in art and scholarship. This
exhibit continues Kahraman’s explorations of geo-body potentials of the discriminated, reduces the discriminating
gaze to size and depletes it from its self-assigned privileges.

The awareness of being seen by the discriminating gaze of migrant consciousness is here at work. We are
dislocated; we feel observed by the women and enclosed within the walls: I know you are looking at me, and I am
also looking at you. Kahraman’s artwork makes the point through her creative imagination and her skillful mastery of
colors, shape and obsession with the female human body.

There is here again a double move that support each other: Kahraman’s undressed and scanned body, which cannot
be detached from the walls of the house where she was born and that are imprinted in her skin and her memories,
works hand in hand with her “look at me looking at you.”

That is the shift in sensing, knowing and believing I mentioned above. The world looks how you sense it and you
sense it through the local history you have been raised and through the place your local history has in the Western
invention of “orientalism.” You sense the world rather than you seeing it – which shifts away from the dominant
Western world-view. Kahraman is able to achieve this through border-thinking, which can only emerge from migrants
dwelling within hierarchical boundaries and borderlands.

6
Hayv Kahraman, unpublished ms.
7
Hayv Kahraman K, from the interview with Ana Finel Honigman).

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