Hayv Kahraman has honed a signature style by repeatedly painting the same figure: a fleshy female body with pale, almost translucent skin, whose face – framed by a mass of black hair often executed with a single, swooping calligraphic gesture – displays an expression...
A mahaffa, I learn, is a handheld fan made by weaving the fronds of palm trees, a ubiquitous household item that is emblematic of Iraq and the Gulf region. It is also one of the few belongings that Hayv Kahraman’s family took with them as they fled to Sweden from...
Hayv Kahraman Jack Shainman Gallery October 26, 2017–December 20, 2017 For more than a decade, the Baghdad-born, Los Angeles–based artist Hayv Kahraman has been making paintings in a style that is unmistakably her own, mixing elements of Persian miniature and...
Iraq has been the site of harrowing violence in the last four decades. From dictatorship to bombing campaigns, economic sanctions, military invasions and occupations, it is a space of ongoing mutilation and destruction. This mutilation and the wounds and remains it...
