Exhibitions

Hayv Kahraman

Hayv Kahraman

Three feminine figures face each other in the center of the painting, plucking large almond-shaped eyeballs off a stem. The background is a raw, beige linen. Three of the four corners of the painting are covered in a blue-green marbled pattern.
Three feminine figures face each other in the center of the painting, plucking large almond-shaped eyeballs off a stem. The background is a raw, beige linen. Three of the four corners of the painting are covered in a blue-green marbled pattern.
The ICA SF presents Hayv Kahraman’s (b. Baghdad, Iraq) largest museum solo exhibition to date, premiering new techniques and large-scale installations. Informed by her own experience as an Iraqi refugee in Sweden, pressured to assimilate quickly in order to prove herself “worthy” of staying, Kahraman exposes the links between human subjugation and botanical classification. While researching Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, she began to see the insidious colonial hierarchies he embedded into early understandings of plant species. The field of botany itself was propelled by the expansion of empire, and grew by extracting and erasing Indigenous knowledge systems, ultimately re-naming species according to nationalistic white European desires. Kahraman’s new body of work will address this history and propose a radical new relationship with the natural world.

Date

September 23, 2023–February 18, 2024

HAYV KAHRAMAN

Artist Website & Instagram

IMAGE

Loves Me, Loves Me Not, 2023, oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist

Building on her engagement with land, Kahraman will incorporate marbling techniques as a fluid and anti-colonial gesture. Marbled compositions on linen pay homage to her nomadic Kurdish ancestors, their constant movement through and intimate knowledge of the mountains, and an expanded understanding of home. There is no way to reproduce marbled work – each one is unique. Through this singularity Kahraman’s work refuses to be stolen, appropriated, or claimed. For her, the work screams: “you cannot erase me, you cannot possess me, and even if you try, you can never remake me in your vision.”

Kahraman describes her female figures as extensions of her own body, but not quite self-portraits. They challenge white, Eurocentric ideals and embody a collective experience. Her figures are often twisted, contorted, or detached from their body parts as a metaphor for the sense of detachment refugees feel after leaving their homelands. This “army of fierce women” rejects commodification and eroticization to fight for true liberation and healing.