Artist Spotlight with Bayan Kiwan

ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist Bayan Kiwan as part of our Artist Spotlight series.

Bayan Kiwan is an artist based between New York and Amman. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Jordan, and an MA in art, gender and sexuality, with a focus on the Arab world from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Kiwan’s research and practice are driven by questions of place, memory, and the everyday as an inscrutable site of resistance. An extension of this, her paintings are explorations of women’s private sociality and intimacy. 

ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?

Bayan Kiwan: In recent paintings, I feature women placed in casual intimacies in domestic interiors–sites of fleeting utopias in the company of other women. These portrayals of rather mundane moments are significant because of their potentiality. The occasion and nature of the relationship of the figures is not made explicit. The soft comradeship is just slightly peculiar, the space slightly strange–this uncanny treatment becomes a metaphor for what more could, and does, happen. The compositions collapse unstaged present moments, but also revise the past, and allude to a promise, a time in the future. They attempt to foreground the objects, flesh and what atmospherically emerges between the subjects. This is part of an ongoing formal exploration of inscrutability, and subtle everyday forms of resistance that are just as crucial as more commonly recognizable public and disruptive modes of resistance.

The subtle act of attentively painting love and its abundance around me is a reckoning with the love violently ripped from my grandmother and, by extension, me. She had Alzheimer’s in her final year, and in a rare lucid moment made a very poignant statement regretfully confessing that she could not nurture love in her children, and sees the repercussions of that in the way they live. Upon exile, life had become about mere survival. She said that she did not know how to love, that she did not have the time. This small interaction—intimate, mundane—viscerally revealed larger structures of oppression, and their pervasiveness into the most intimate aspects of our life. 

I also return to this intimacy of colonial violence as it relates to gender. Our plight is used to justify genocide, land theft, and military terror, claiming that such crimes promote the liberation of me and my friends. Looking to existing networks of care resists the co-optation of our struggle.

AE: Tell us about your approach and process to painting, as well as your choice of color and palettes. What is the primary subject matter of your work?

BK: I think figurative painting is a remarkable exercise in looking, really looking to see things as though we do not know them, slowly bypassing preconceived notions and assumptions that are taken for granted. This makes it useful, to me, for imagining other possibilities of being, of sensing, feeling and knowing otherwise. Palestinian artist and writer Kamal Boullata envisions revolution as transforming the “content” of the individual rather than the “form” of society, and that this transformation “entails a radical transformation of all the inherited and pre-existing values.

I think painting is an affective form of knowing. In my practice, it is both a revisionist and imaginative tool that grounds me in a history beyond the limited categories and stereotypes that are imposed on “Arab” women. My current subject matter is drawn from a personal archive of unstaged photos documenting everyday moments among people I love. I spend a lot of time with these images, collapsing them onto each other and they open up every domestic space—elusive, private, fantastic—as always in excess of neat narrative.

The color palette follows in this aliveness of the space and objects: fleshy, whimsical, feminine. The intimacy has been described as emerging through this fleshy treatment just as much as it comes through the relation of the figures.

AE: Talk to us about the concept of ‘slow looking’ How do you employ “slow looking” in areas of your practice beyond painting?

BK: As I mentioned, figurative painting is an act of careful looking, seeing anew, and questioning. It necessitates a certain fullness of presence, of care. Early on in the craft, we realize that what we “know” obstructs our ability to see let alone translate what we observe. For me, painting is not just about translating what’s familiar but also seeing it differently, animating it and dreaming it otherwise. It makes the better future nearer, finding glimpses of it in what already exists.

AE: How has your work or practice evolved since moving to New York from Amman?

BK: Well, since my work is very much rooted in my everyday life, it inevitably adapted and expanded its limits with this relocation. My studies opened up new avenues for thinking through the stakes of the work and why I have the urge to make it. The main shift was moving away from local content towards new formulations of kinship and belonging; I am more invested in a diasporic scattered relationality of like-minded folk whose defiance similarly challenges the status quo, with whom I find pockets of joy and togetherness. And New York is such a rich place for looking at paintings! 

AE: You have a series of paintings dedicated to necks. Can you discuss the importance of necks within your work, both on a physical and metaphorical level?  

BK: The first neck I painted was a gift to my friend Ola Elkhaldi after multiple conversations on power and where it intersects with the voice. Painting neck after neck in what became an ongoing series, this part of the body magnified to signify many meanings. I am haunted by the voice of Ghassan Kanafani stating that a conversation with the oppressor is a conversation between the sword and the neck. I remember seeing and hearing my friend exclaim “you’re suffocating me” in a video that went viral of soldiers pressing their knees to his neck during the Sheikh Jarrah protests. I think of children’s heads pulled by gravity from limp necks as their bodies are removed from underneath rubble. Its meanings range from extremely violent and vulnerable connotations, to softness and sensuality as the neck is an erogenous zone, a site of immense pleasure. This close and slow meditation inevitably moves us away from reductive interpretations, such as the dichotomy of mind and body, joined as they are by the neck, a thing in-between. 

AE: What or who are some of your major creative influences, and why?

BK: I’ve been looking at Huguette Caland recently, and how she plays with line, moving the body fluidly into landscape and back and in between. I’m drawn to the paintings of Edward Hopper as slow and attentive to introspective or simply distracted mundane scenes. I often return to his use of light, its softness and intensity, what it illuminates, what it frames, what it doesn’t, and what preserves the unknowability of the subjects. How I paint has ties to the western tradition, and I am in conversation with orientalist painters. The domestic sphere is a contested site for both exoticising fantasy as well as stereotyping Arab women as distinctly oppressed and relegated into the home. Its inaccessibility and inscrutability holds its capacity for excess, and what goes on there in between women that is beyond the gaze be it colonial, patriarchal or moralizing.

AE: What are you currently working on and do you have any shows or projects upcoming in 2023-2024?

BK: I am currently experimenting with surfaces to accentuate the domestic, voyeur tension and ideas of opacity and inscrutability. What does it mean to make the drawing on blinds? Is this surface choice useful or exciting? I’m also playing with an idea related to tea that’s moving away from figuration and familiar media towards building fictive maps of kinship. 

I am also currently part of the New Agents residency with Mophradat. 

— Interview by Lila Nazemian

BAYAN KIWAN ONLINE:

Website: bayankiwan.com

Instagram: @bayankiw

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