Interview with Robin Kane

Many works alternate between black and white: is this an aesthetic choice or a way of addressing human duality and contradiction?

It’s a deliberate reduction rather than a symbolic gesture.
Working in black and white removes excess information so that structure, texture, and weight become more legible. It stabilises the image and concentrates attention on how elements relate, rather than what they represent.
The decision is not aesthetic in itself. It is determined by what the work requires. If colour is necessary, it enters the image in the same way, as a structural component, not as a stylistic addition.
Nothing is chosen independently. Every element is defined by the role it needs to perform within the image.

Many figures appear to carry an invisible weight or exist in solitude: what kind of pain are you engaging with personal, collective, or existential?

The figures do carry a weight, but I don’t reduce that to pain.
What is held within the body can take many forms historical, cultural, social, or personal. It can include trauma, guilt, shame but also attachment, care, expectation, or memory. These conditions accumulate without needing to be defined or expressed explicitly.
Working with a single figure is a deliberate choice. It allows the image to hold that weight without explaining it or assigning it a narrative. What appears as solitude is not absence, but concentration.
The work is not interested in naming what is carried, but in sustaining the presence of it.

Metamorphosis frequently appears in your work: is transformation a form of evolution, or does it also involve a loss of self?

I wouldn’t describe it as metamorphosis.
Across the work, transformation is not treated as a defined event or a directional process. It doesn’t move toward resolution, and it doesn’t imply loss.
Identity is approached as provisional something that holds temporarily before it begins to shift. Change accumulates until a given form can no longer sustain itself, and what follows is not disappearance, but reconfiguration.
The body doesn’t become something else. It reorganises what it already contains.
The work stays within that condition, rather than framing transformation as evolution or decline.

Long garments, solemn postures, and braids give the figures a ritual quality: are you working with memory, identity, or spirituality?

These elements are rooted in my own cultural background. They reference Circassian forms of dress and bodily structure, which carry histories of displacement, loss, and continuity.
I don’t use them to illustrate that history directly, but it remains present in how the body is constructed and held. The garments and braids extend the figure beyond itself, introducing a sense of connection to lineage, to land, and to what has been carried forward despite rupture.
What might read as ritual comes from that continuity. Not as a representation of belief, but as a way the body holds and repeats what it inherits.
While these forms are specific in origin, they don’t remain limited to it. They resonate across different histories where displacement and inherited conditions are carried through the body. The work doesn’t attempt to represent those experiences directly, but it holds a shared condition something that persists, even when its origin is no longer accessible.

Hands and bodily details often seem to express more than the face: do you see the body as a more direct repository of memory than language?

I don’t approach the body as something that expresses more than language, but as something that holds differently.
Language organises and resolves. The body does not. It retains what it carries without translating it into something explicit through posture, gesture, and form.
I resist the use of facial expression because it fixes the image too quickly. It turns the figure into something readable, and the work is not interested in producing that kind of clarity.
This approach is informed by my background in dance, where the body carries meaning through movement rather than expression. That training shapes how I work with the figure not as something that performs emotion, but as something that sustains it.
Across the work, the body is not treated as a subject to be understood, but as a structure that holds tension without resolving it.
What matters is not what is communicated, but what is sustained.

Article written by Martina Arapi