In the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, the LA-based artist recounts a memory of her mother’s arduous quest for asylum
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“My mum passed away in 2020, and we were very close. My sister found this cassette tape where she had recorded her voice to send to the immigration office in Stockholm. I have a memory of her sitting with the tape recorder, likening herself to a cockroach, saying, ‘I’m not an insect you can step on.’ I think about it all the time – why is one life worth more than another? It’s heartbreaking because she’s pleading for our asylum. She speaks of waiting. If you’re undocumented, waiting can mean years. We would wait for the post every day, hoping to be approved. But we were denied based on my mum’s inability to prove that she was my mum. She said, ‘Who are you to tell me who I am? I have been Sizar Barzendji for 49 years.’ I’m very conceptual as an artist, but lately I’ve been letting things come out without judging them and a lot of eyes have been coming through. It’s all about invisibility – and hyper-visibility – being seen a certain way as a refugee.”
In 1992, when she was 11, Hayv Kahraman and her family fled war-torn Iraq and sought asylum in Stockholm. Now based in LA, she has evolved her practice to encompass painting, sculpture and performance as she reckons with the political and personal implications of war, colonisation and the ‘other’. Kahraman paints nude female figures impossibly contorted or disfigured, as “extensions of her own body”; they symbolise the never-ending reclamation of agency, recognition and power stolen from asylum seekers and women. More recently, that found recording of her mother pleading for asylum has started leading her figures towards liberation.
Hair: Nikki Providence at Forward Artists using LIVING PROOF. Make-up: Sandy Ganzer at Forward Artists using ILIA BEAUTY. Photographic assistant: Kaleb Marshall. Styling assistant: Raea Palmieri. Production: Jones Management
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.