Los Angeles-based Iraqi-American artist Hayv Kahraman draws upon her life experiences as a refugee woman to create paintings, sketches, and sculpture that examine and confront issues of identity, displacement, and colonisation of the mind.
Read MoreBorn in Baghdad in 1981, Kahraman witnessed events of the Iran-Iraq War and the First Gulf War firsthand as a child. At the age of 11, Kahraman and her family fled Iraq using fake passports and settled as refugees in Sweden. These early experiences of war and living as a displaced minority in a small and insular community have been influential to the artist's work.
From Sweden, Kahraman moved to Florence to study graphic design at the Accademia d'Arte e Design for four years—a period that exposed her to the dominant Western European Renaissance aesthetic. This was followed by another radical change in 2006: moving to a small town in the United States outside of Phoenix, Arizona, before she eventually settled in California.
A large part of Hayv Kahraman's work, from the outset, has revolved around crystalising her own sense of identity and memories of her upbringing. From her early ink works such as Kurdish Dance (2006) and Mevlevi (2007), and paintings like the 'Sacrifice' series from 2008, she has incorporated culturally specific themes, portrayed in a visual language that reflects traditional Iraqi art forms hybridised with European and Asian motifs—a conscious product of her migratory experiences.
In her 2015 solo show How Iraqi Are You at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Kahraman presented a series of large-scale paintings based on 12th-century Iraqi manuscript illustrations. Closer inspection of the actions of the figures—white females rendered in a manner that blends Renaissance painting with Japanese illustration and Persian miniatures—and the accompanying Arabic text, reveal them to be recalling sporadic memories of her upbringing in Iraq and experience as a refugee.
Kahraman deploys the imagery of white female forms from Renaissance painting in a conscious effort to illustrate the colonisation of the mind, subjugating a person's identity and culture to accept those Renaissance models as universal expressions of beauty.
Hayv Kahraman comes at her work not just from the perspective of a subjugated cultural other, but also as a woman. From the outset, all the figures in her works have been women. These female figures act both as the artist's own semi-autobiographic representations of herself as well as a collective female identity.
Some of her early works very graphically conveyed the sense of subjugation faced by Iraqi women who fall victim to honour killings and other forms of gendered violence. This, in part, the artist attributes to her own experience in a physically abusive relationship, which enabled her to relate personally to those women's suffering. At the same time, from an early stage, her works have altered paradigms empowering her female characters. For instance, in Hayv Kahraman's 'Sacrifice' series, she recasts women into the role of characters in the scriptural story of the Sacrifice of The Lamb.
Not Quite Human, a two-part exhibition of new works by Hayv Kahraman, uniquely challenged submissive gender roles through the depiction of female contortionists. The first iteration took place at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York (2019) and the second was shown with Pilar Corrias in London (2020). These female figures contorted into submissive poses are an eroticised and fetished 'other', subject to the male gaze. The subjectifying power of that gaze, however, is subverted by the women who return an uncompromising gaze to the viewer.
With her resistant affirmations of female and fluid diasporic identity, Hayv Kahraman has quickly risen to international prominence. She has featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the globe. Her work features in prominent permanent collections including the British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, and the Saatchi Gallery, as well as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In 2018, the Victoria & Albert Museum awarded Kahraman the Jameel Prize. She was awarded a two-week residency at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design in Honolulu in March the following year.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2020
