Person nummer, forms part of Hayv Kahraman’s eight-part series titled How Iraqi Are You? that takes as its source inspiration the Mawamat al Hariri, a twelfth-century illuminated text from the Baghdad school of miniature painting that focused on the everyday life of Iraqis, and in which sexuality is interestingly prominent. In the present example the women lift their skirts, and one offers the other a piece of paper. The black script mirrors the thickness of the strokes, shapes, and angles of the original manuscript as the artist re-learnt how to write in her mother tongue. Reflecting the composition of the illuminated manuscript folios which had been divided with the text either at the bottom or top of the work, in the present example, running along the lower edge it reads: “When you arrive to Sweden you are given a personal identity number ‘person nummer.’ That is pronounced ‘peshoon number.’ In the Iraqi dialect peshoon means vagina”.
