ZEYNEP KARAHASAN
Adornment (2025)
Archival Pigment Print on Baryta Paper
Adornment explores the layered politics of veiling and unveiling, challenging the idea that either can be reduced simply to freedom or coercion. Drawing on debates around epistemic injustice, the work foregrounds how women’s experiences of covering and exposure are frequently misrecognized or rendered unintelligible within dominant cultural and political narratives. By enveloping the body in artificial hair, the piece destabilizes what is considered “natural” in practices of concealment and display—both of which, in reality, serve as sites of profit, regulation and objectification: one monetizing the hidden, the other the revealed. Resonating with struggles in Turkey, Iran, and beyond, Adornment asks how women’s choices are framed, constrained, and claimed by competing visions of modernity.
Photography by Joshua Yang (@joshh.yang)
Part of the Industry of the Ordinary summer residency and the group exhibition Map Without Territory at SoNa Chicago Contemporary Art
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