I am in absolute awe of everything Iraqi born, LA based artist Hayv Kahraman creates. The first piece above, for example, is titled “Strip Search”. Beautiful, powerful, personal, chill-inducing … all of it. These pieces are just a few of the works from her 2015-2016  “Audible Inaudible” series. Here are her words about this work:

“Audible Inaudible is a term keyed by ethnomusicologist Martin J Daughtry where the violent sounds of war become muted by its auditors as a mechanism for survival.

I have multiple memories that involve the terrifying sound of the air raid siren so I started the research in how to translate a sonic memory into object. This lead me to Martin’s a book titled “Listening to War, Sound, Music and Survival in Wartime Iraq” where he describes an interview with a mother shielding her children from the violent sounds of war by holding them tight and pressing her arms against their ears. Her body, her flesh then acted as a perfect, natural micro environment to protect her children. I wanted to mimic this concept of “flesh as defense” so I introduced pyramid acoustic foam in the paintings; a material that “detains” sound. I started surgically cutting my linen and pushing the foam through it from the back. As it was penetrating the surface I felt as if I was conducting an operation of resistance. These calculated cuts and wounds were enabling the painting to breathe. Inhaling and exhaling it was reacting, resisting, defending and accepting these sonic wounds.”

Speechless.