ZEYNEP KARAHASAN
Net (2025)
Installation
Artificial Hair
Net suspends long strands of artificial hair to form a curtain that directs movement between spaces. Rather than displaying the body, the work withholds it, shifting attention to the hair itself as a site of memory, control, and epistemic struggle. As viewers move through thestrands, they become ensnared in their texture - caught between irritation, amusement, and unease - enacting the entanglement of choice and non-choice that shapes the politics of veiling. The work reflects on how testimonial injustice silences women’s accounts of their own practices, while hermeneutical gaps distort their meanings, reducing complex negotiations of self to symbols of either tradition or resistance. This enforced tactile encounter collapses the distance between image and audience, pulling viewers into the very system of choice and constraint that the work interrogates. Net insists that veiling cannot be understood apart from the lived contradictions of women navigating trauma, power and religion in a contemporary context.
Part of the Industry of the Ordinary summer residency and the group exhibition Map Without Territory at SoNa Chicago Contemporary Art