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Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country, in particular the Gadigal people on whose land the Biennale of Sydney is located. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture and pay our respect to Elders, past and present.

First Nations people are respectfully advised that this site includes works, names and images of deceased people. This includes cultural practices and artistic intellectual property of a sensitive nature.

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Hayv Kahraman, Bodies of Water, 2023–2024 (detail). Co-commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia with generous assistance from the Commonwealth through the Council for Australian-Arab Relations, which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, Vielmetter Los Angeles and The Third Line, Dubai. © Hayv Kahraman. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art. Photograph: Hamish McIntosh.

Museum of Contemporary Art

Bodies of Water, 2023-2024
oil and acrylic on canvas

Co-commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, Vielmetter Los Angeles and The Third Line, Dubai.

In researching Australia’s immigration policy, Hayv Kahraman began to draw parallels between water, migration and the processes of Ebru marbling, a traditional Turkish art form which involves painting on water.

Having been an undocumented migrant herself, travelling via air and on foot, Kahraman was struck by the vulnerability of those fleeing to Australia and Europe by sea. Surrounded by such vastness, new possibilities are offered up, yet the risks presented by open waters are profound. It is well documented that sea-crossings result in many migrant fatalities, the unknown bodies of the deceased disappearing into the same waters that might have been their salvation.

In Bodies of Water, Kahraman, inspired by a self-generating plankton known as the immortal jellyfish, presents these souls as hybrid plankton-ghost creatures haunting the ocean through Ebru marbling. The unique imprint of marbling resonates with human fingerprints, which the European Union stores in its asylum fingerprint database system to surveil those crossing borders. To avoid being tracked, many asylum seekers have erased their own fingerprints by burning and abrasion.