Hayv Kahraman

Hayv Kahraman (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.

Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her recent solo exhibitions are at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2024) and the ICA San Francisco (2024), which traveled to the Frye Museum in Seattle, WA (2024-25). Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, Honolulu, HI; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE. Her work was be featured in group exhibitions including Surrealism(s) – Then & Now at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2025); Hawai’i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NŌ at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI (2025); From Cindy Sherman to Francesco Vezzoli: 80 Contemporary Artists at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy (2025); and Ten Thousand Suns, The 24th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2024). Her work is included in several public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; North Carolina Museum of Art; the Rubell Family Collection; the British Museum, London; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.