Hayv Kahraman: Look Me in the Eyes @ Frye Art Museum 

Looking back at you 👁️

📸: Hayv Kahraman. Look Me in the Eyes, No. 1 (detail), 2023.

📆 Thru Sunday, February 2nd, 2025
🎟 Free
📍 Frye Art Museum: 704 Terry Ave, Seattle

ℹ️ More info and directions here

When you walk into Hayv Kahraman’s Look Me in the Eyes exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, it’s not just your eyeballs taking in the paintings and sculptures. Rather, all those paintings and sculptures are looking right back at you.

Kahraman’s largest solo museum show to date features hundreds of her signature eye motifs—eyes on bricks, eyes as plants, eyes as food. These heavy-lidded, thick eyebrow-ed eyes are surveilling the viewers, forcing them to think about their own bodily comportment, presentation, and relationship to the art. As an Iraqi Kurdish refugee who grew up in Sweden, Kahraman’s exhibition reflects her experience as an immigrant, navigating racial hierarchies, systems of oppression, and biases against “othered” people in the West. Specifically, the artist’s work is in conversation with Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist from the 18th-century who came up with the binomial nomenclature system for naming plants and animals. 

“[H]e and his pupils were traveling the globe giving everything Latin names and erasing what these plants meant to local people, ignoring how they operated within different systems,” Kahraman said in an interview with BOMB Magazine. “He was an incredibly religious man, and he believed his ability to translate nature was divined from God. Linnaeus injected these prejudices and latent hierarchies into the natural world.”

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Author

An author pic of Jas Keimig. They have blue braids.

Jas Keimig

Jas Keimig is an arts and culture writer in Seattle. Their work has previously appeared in The Stranger, i-D, Netflix, and Feast Portland. They won a game show once and have a thing for stickers.