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"Silence is Gold" on view September 8 through October 27, 2018 at Susanne Vielmetter: Los Angeles Projects

Dr. Miriam Ticktin on Havy Kahraman's exhibition "Silence Is Gold":

The number of immigrants and refugees accepted in the United States and in Europe — and in the global North more generally — has been steadily decreasing, to the point where one’s case must be truly exceptional in order to be legally recognized. Border walls are being built at an unprecedented rate – there were 70 globally at the last count, versus 15 in 1990 — marking a new global right-wing populist politics of border closure. But, the unwillingness to let people in, no matter how much they are suffering, is not new, of course. In Silence is Gold, Iraqi-born artist Hayv Kahraman is inspired by the mass exodus of Kurds from Iraq in April 1991, that she herself was a part of, as a child. This exodus of 3 million people was prompted by what was largely understood as chemical weapons attacks on the Kurdish towns, by Saddam Hussein’s government. Her work grapples with how the exodus was portrayed in the global North, and what elicited attention and resources for those who were fleeing. How can situations of suffering and violence be portrayed, without erasing the dignity of those who suffer, without representing them as victims, as uncivilized and unable to care for themselves? Then, as now, proving one’s worthiness for asylum requires evoking the pity or compassion of the immigration or asylum officials — often by way of a mediatized appeal to a larger public — and demonstrating that the persecution one is fleeing is particularly horrendous.

First, what qualifies as particularly horrendous violence? In a strange and recent twist, today, one of the more promising ways to illustrate the “well-founded fear of persecution” necessary to claim asylum is through the language and imagery of sexual violence — this has special appeal, even if one may have been otherwise tortured, violated or threatened. The legal and moral weight carried by stories of sexual violence is a relatively recent phenomenon; before the early 2000s, survivors of sexual violence were not even included in standard models of humanitarian aid delivery. This is an unexpected result of the successful lobbying of women’s movements of the global North and South in the 1990s; they created the category of “violence against women” by taking bodily integrity as the lowest common denominator of their movements – the one thing they could agree upon — even if we know that bodies can never be fully abstracted from their cultural, political or social contexts, and even if we know that what constitutes violence is not always obvious (are breast implants a forms of gender-based violence?).