(b. Baghdad, Iraq; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist whose practice addresses racialized gender and body politics, migrant consciousness, and the marginal spaces of diasporic life. Drawing from her personal history as an Iraqi émigré, first to Europe, then to the U.S., Kahraman explores the body as a methodology for complicating dominant narratives of what it means to be human today. Kahraman’s approach to painting is interdisciplinary, thinking with the natural and biosciences and in more than human interminglings. Multiple thought nodes coalesce in each body of work in the attempt to expose colonial logics and bridge plural voices and imaginaries. Her figures, which she considers both as self-portraits and part of a broader collective, challenge traditional norms and demand different investigations of power. The figures enact performative and ritualistic movements alluding to practices of care and renewal. At its core, Kahraman’s work reflects on the process of Othering, exploring the gap between the immigrant, gendered subject and the normative gaze of a white, heteropatriarchal society.
Displacement has long been central to Hayv’s practice, made even more relevant by the recent Los Angeles wildfires that left her family without a livable home. Her recent body of work, Ghost Fires, explores the intertwined forces of ecocidal destruction, memory, and regeneration. These works began before the fires and now feel uncannily prophetic. Inspired in part by a dystopian childhood fable, these new pieces, featuring marbled fibers, linen spirals, and scorched eyes, reflect what Kahraman calls “reworlding”: an act of remembering, reimagining, and reclaiming.
