Give and Take

'If then current conceptions of beauty were shaped by Western education, Hayv Kahraman's work is nothing less than engaged in dewesternizing the concept of beauty. Beauty, like many equivalent basic human experiences, cannot be universally regulated. If then Western mainstream and common sense concepts of beauty were projected to regulate non-European colonized societies, then Hayv's work is not only dewesternizing art and aesthetic but it is also decolonial in the specific sense that confronts and delinks from the relentless paws of coloniality.

Hayv Kahraman's 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 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.'

(W.D. Mignolo in Hayv Kahraman: Let the Guest be the Master, exh. cat., New York, Jack Shainman Gallery, 2013).