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Izabella Scott

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.



Articles Available Online


Shola von Reinhold’s ‘LOTE’

Book Review

September 2020

Izabella Scott

Book Review

September 2020

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black...

Art Review

November 2019

Actually, the Dead are Not Dead

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2019

During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a...

In Hayv Kahraman’s vast painting, ‘Entanglements no1’ (2021), all life is suspended Two female figures, weightless though weighed down, are enchained in a series of interlocking intestinal knots Thick dark coils, bigger than a clenched fist, tighter than the developing grip this work has on you, curl around feet and hands Caught and contained in a prison not of their own making, the women cling to the tubular cords, peering at the viewer from behind this oppressive net    Overwhelming in scope and size, ‘Entanglements no1’ commands my attention, luring my gaze into its tense twists and dense depressive curlicues This mesmeric encounter leaves me to ask who is ensnaring who? Am I entangled or are Kahraman’s women? Are they clinging on for dear life or desperately trying to get out? This ambiguity is accentuated so that we, like her women, are forced to confront the troubling position of being psychologically and physiologically stuck Is healing to be found in the digressive digestive passages palpably found and felt in her works? Or are we, too, destined to be trapped in the neurotic networks of our own bodies and minds?   Gut Feelings (2022), a solo exhibition of Kahraman’s paintings and mixed media works at the Mosaic Rooms in London, explores this blurring of inner and outer, of space and form Spread across three galleries, the exhibition disentangles the ties of trauma through a visual synecdoche of thick black cords – at once reminiscent of neurons and the gastrointestinal tract – snaked around and protruding out of female bodies Inspired by neuro-sculpting and psychotherapeutic neurological models espoused by trauma therapists Bessel van der Kolk and Resmaa Menakem, Gut Feelings embraces the intersection between the socio-cultural and the biological, between effects and their affective imprints, between external sites and our internal, somatically-held responses to them    To be ensnared by Kahraman’s work, much like her female figures, is, therefore, to work through the muck of our own gut In all their vertiginous, hypnotic intensity, many of the paintings, like ‘Entanglements no1’, pull us further and further into this visceral psycho-biological journey, pushing us to confront

Contributor

September 2015

Izabella Scott

Contributor

September 2015

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.

Book Review

August 2019

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’

Izabella Scott

Book Review

August 2019

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Echo Chamber

Art Review

November 2017

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2017

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze. Artist Navine G....
Hot Rocks

feature

November 2016

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed full of dusty freezer bags....
False shadows

Art

August 2016

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis...

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poetry

January 2015

My Beloved Uncles

Tove Jansson

TR. Thomas Teal

poetry

January 2015

However tired of each other they must have grown from time to time, there was always great solidarity among...

fiction

February 2014

Coral

R. B. Pillay

fiction

February 2014

Early one morning, you wake up with the smell of burnt sheets in your nose, the sheets that you...

Art

Issue No. 9

Dr Gaz

Jeff Keen

Art

Issue No. 9

Jeff Keen was among the most influential of a pioneering generation of experimental film-makers to emerge from the United...

 

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