Hayv Kahraman - New Perspectives in Painting

Hayv Kahraman’s paintings are a refined confluence of cultures, an “otherworld” where different pictorial traditions meet, and every picture tells a story. Intensely personal, her paintings are concerned with understanding the politics of tradition and gender. Born in Baghdad in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), Kahraman spent her formative years in exile. Her journey as a refugee began aged eleven when she, her mother and sister travelled from Iraq on false passports through Ethiopia, Yemen, and Germany, finally settling in the far north of Sweden (where her father joined them a year later). She began to paint at the age of twelve and went on to study art and design in Florence, after which she returned to Sweden to take a degree in web design. Without doubt her aesthetic has been shaped as much by her émigré status in Europe, and now America, as it has by her natural gift for graphics.

Bab el Sheikh, 2013
Kahraman’s early works range in their references from Japanese sumi-e painting, Arabic calligraphy, and Art Nouveau. Brutal images of rape, suicide, and murder are particularly unnerving when executed with the delicate, light stroke of brushed ink. Painting has become Kahraman’s place of protest (as much as it is her salvation). Women—grieving mothers, displaced and alienated girls—take centre stage in her pictures which represent, and therefore advocate for, those silenced by their gender, oppressed by politics, or, through no fault of their own, caught up in the consequences of war. Migrant 11 (2009) quite literally reveals, in a reversed mirror image, the “double consciousness” of an individual whose identity is divided: her arms free on the one side, and on the other contorted and twisted into a knot behind her back. Skillfully combining abstraction with figuration, these stylized figures (crafted from three-dimensional scans of Kahraman’s own body) are symbols of the “every woman.” In Bab el Sheikh(2013) the metaphor of the mashrabiya (a type of oriel window traditional in Arabic architecture) is incorporated not only as an aesthetic device to arrange Kahraman’s characters in a rhythmic conversational style, but also to recall its dual purpose: to provide shelter or to imprison. In Her Name is Gun (2015), tessellated, geometric patterns—recognizable in Islamic art—serve to structure the painting. Centrally placed on raw untreated canvas (specifically sourced by Kahraman for its hue), these idealized women seem to be as influenced by Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance Venus (1484–86) as by the twelfth and thirteenth-century manuscripts of the Baghdad school of miniature painting.

Migrant 11, 2009
Kahraman’s canvases absorb tradition, but with a knowing interpretation that is both personal and political. Intra-cultural synergies exist in a mix of historical and traditional elements and each painting is conceived and imbued with a sense of story—character, plot, situation, conflict, and resolution—more commonly associated with theatre, cinema, or literature. As if to confirm this impression, in her most recent works such as Local Game and Magic Lamp (both 2015), Kahraman has included “subtitles” on her paintings, written in the calligraphic naskh (a fluid script, often used to comment and transcribe the Quran). Such texts act as extended captions to the paintings themselves.
                                                                                                               ---Grainne Sweeney

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