Thierry Golderg Projects is pleased to present a two-person show with paintings by Hayv Kahraman and I-Ling Eleen Lin. The two female artists – Kahraman born in Iraq, and Lin in Taiwan – explore representations of cross-cultural narratives.

While celebrating the formal qualities of line and depth of detail, Hayv Kahraman challenges issues of gender and honor killings that plague her home country of Iraq. Countering male domination, Kahraman shifts the focus exclusively to female subjects. Serene and attenuated, she poses women symbolically swan-like within the traditional masculine narrative of the sacrifice of the lamb. Her paintings trace the story in three parts from bringing forth the lamb in procession, slitting the throat, to the flaying and skinning. As altered allegories, Kahraman’s female version of this rite satisfies a domestic balance and in the end champions female strength. Harmonizing references from Japanese art, Islamic art, and Italian masters, Kahraman offers an aesthetic awareness that honors diversity and offers the possibility of redemption and empowerment.

I-Ling Eleen Lin’s paintings depict scattered scenes of overturned spaces where figures disregard each other more often than not. Their world suffers, littered with cultural remnants and leftovers, as a result of their own distractions and carelessness. Here, raided stores, dinner tables, and buffets are an all too common scene. The prevailing blankness sets the stage, from which Lin casts a mood of dislocation renewed only by the construct of theater itself as the remaining cultural touchstone for tradition.