Ilyas Kirkan - Artist Statement & Biography

Born in Turkey, Ilyas Kirkan was raised in Denmark and now lives in London. A liberal Western education shaped his Muslim Kurdish Turkish background, resulting in work that questions the idea of fixed notions of identity and culture.

His mixed media paintings often combine acrylic, collage, sand, gravel, glue and newsprint to speak of ways to house the fractured self and to locate and articulate cultural displacement over and above language. Under other materials, the collaged words lose their structure and clarity, and meaning migrates. The encrusted impasto surfaces talk of accrued layers of diverse experience.

A series of red on white paintings began in 2005 and included ‘Rogen Sor’ (‘Red Days’ in Kurdish). Dashes of red travel along a central horizontal line suggesting the pulse of a cardiograph, wounds on pale skin, or blood ties that bind family. Kirkan realised that the series of new red work related to what’s known in Turkish as the ‘gerdek gecesi carsafi’ (‘wedding night sheet’) that is traditionally sought by the groom’s family to provide proof of a new bride’s virginity.

This sparked Kirkan’s current project: ‘Sheets’, 2006 in which he moves from abstract canvasses to a more conceptual installation. In this piece, the artist has collected four bed sheets, stained in blood, from four different women in very differing circumstances: a virginity sheet, a birth sheet, a sheet used when love-making during menstruation and a sheet marking an abortion.

The sheets provide a powerful invocation of the taboos around the female body and its significant rites of passage. They reflect the artist’s fascination with where things begin, the differences between genders and the continuing ignorance around the female reproductive system. The piece presents dramatic evidence that in both the East and West, we still find it hard to look at and discuss what the body produces.

Cherry Smyth - Arts Critic, Curator and Poet

Ilyas Kirkan’s outstanding installation ‘Sheets’ 2006 uses four bed sheets marked in blood, to look at how we perceive women’s bodies and the reproductive cycle. While early feminist artists like Mary Kelly and Hannah Wilke used their own blood as material for art, Kirkan has gathered striking documents of blood-loss from four women, living in Turkey and the UK. The sheets evoke visceral responses: the shame associated with sex during menstruation; the social and religious pressure on women to remain chaste until married; the glory and pain of giving birth; and the poignancy of abortion. The work raises the question of how female blood can act at once as an emblem of purity and signal disgust.

This work continues Kirkan’s desire to push formal boundaries, to talk across cultures about something known and shared but which remains unspoken, unseen. Each sheet with its brownish stains exudes its own particular story, whether it’s pride, embarrassment, regret or defiance. It’s a courageous and remarkably moving piece of work that reveals how open-minded and accepting we really are.

Discussion platform:
Arts Critic, Curator & Poet Cherry Smyth www.cherrysmyth.com
and Artist Margareta Kern www.margaretakern.com