This article looks at Kira Issar’s image-making practice, focusing on how her work engages with ecofeminism, personal memory, and the politics of the body through photography and publishing. It examines projects like her photobooks Medusa’s Prologue and as a djinn as part of this wider inquiry, using them to explore interconnected forms of oppression, abstraction, and emotional states, while framing her practice around experimentation, process, and a visual language that sits between the unsettling and the tender.
“In my most fervently feminist undergrad days, I had a friend bring up the question of our treatment of non-human animals,” says Kira Issar, an image-maker based between the UK and New Delhi. “As I spoke to people, I saw them turn into a stencil of conservative, patriarchal language to justify “the way things are” for social and personal profit: imposed objectification, denial of inherent sentience/subjectivity, displacement of the victim, faith in majoritarianism, faithlessness in boycott culture, critique of protesters, and most of all, a refusal to imagine another world,” she continues.
These conversations would later lead her towards her final project as a student of MA Fashion Communication at Central Saint Martins in London, titled 'Medusa’s Prologue,' a photobook shot between Delhi and London, in which she chronicles the connections in the oppression of women, animals and the environment and draws parallels between these oppressions through their ‘commodity status’ in the eye of the patriarchy.
During the COVID lockdown, Kira went through a phase of reading books from Z-Library, and stumbled across Greta Gaard’s work, which led her to ecofeminist theory. “In a nutshell, it puts forward environmentalism as a feminist issue and expands on how all forms of oppression uphold, interact with, and empower one another,” she explains. Greta’s theory, that posits that the same patriarchal, capitalist ideologies that oppress women also drive the exploitation of nature and nonhuman animals, gave Kira a language to organise her thoughts better as a young adult. “For years, I’ve been in a slump with the question of how I can inject my ideologies into my images,” she shares. Her photo book was where this materialised.
“Politics is essentially about power relations between entities, and when one entity is given power over another, do they choose to protect, or do they choose to exploit? What all feminisms have in common is that they centre bodily autonomy and consent culture, which is at odds with our systems of animal exploitation.”Kira Issar
In the photobook, Kira constructs minimal, monochromatic images of women’s bodies with animals and plants, both juxtaposing them against each other and stitching them together into an organic whole. With a softer palette and sublime compositions, the images poeticize the tenets of ecofeminism, particularly in divorcing the bodies from the gaze of consumption that we’re used to looking at them with. These invocations have now become a part of her sensibility as an image-maker. “I’ve learned that I’m troubled by something that is subtle and suggestive, particularly when I am not,” she muses. “Frankly, after a few years of chasing it and trying to force it, I gave up and just made pictures about feelings. But it’s certainly a theme that haunts me, and I will return to it in my own time.”
Kira is at a place in her practice, she tells us, where she likes to indulge in the physicality of images. She’s interested in replicating or denoting a feeling instead of a subject. Alternative processes, often born of experimentation or even mistakes, allow her to slow down and spend more time with an image to get to that place. “Every decision with it feels intentional,” she shares. The chlorophyll technique, which takes place through photosynthesis, is one example among other analogous experiments in the development of images.
In her riso printed photo book ‘as a djinn’ with MOM Publishing, Kira captured a dark, impressionistic portrait of Delhi — “a crowded, noisy concrete labyrinth, a sedimented necropolis” as the book notes. These black & white images of an ancient world that has witnessed and weathered the passage of time were an attempt at building an ‘Indo-Gothic’ genre for the artist.
“I think my fixation on that style has more to do with an autobiographical coagulation: the powerlessness of being a child, an abject failure to fit into every social institution, the female experience of being socially engineered into assumed inadequacy, disappointment in one’s idols, the inside-out/outside-in masks of morality people wear, the loneliness of sticking to your guns”Kira Issar
Like Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, who dies exceptionally well as if it were an art, Kira’s artistic persuasions come from a willing descent into the violent and tormented undercurrents of our world, which still remain tender and luminous with difficult truths in her hands. “A degree of melancholic, dark, brooding surrealism is rather difficult to rid from me — and my work,” shares Kira, although she does admittedly swing the other way from time to time and make more eccentric images. “I feel like I am most drawn to subject matter that exists in the middle of the terrifying and the beautiful.”
Follow Kira here.
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