...I would be prepared to bet that Hayv Kahraman, another Iraqi from Baghdad, has studied early Chinese art and the masterpieces of Renaissance Florence, as well as Islamic miniatures, because her depictions, particularly the diptych, Carrying on Shoulder 1 & Carrying on Shoulder 2 are influenced by the serenity, delicacy and angelic beauty of these periods of explosive artistic riches. All her paintings depict the fable of the sacrifice of the lamb, recorded both in the Koran and the Bible, but she recasts the legend with women taking the men's role. Her exquisite women are depicted two dimensionally on bare canvas, their elongated necks and delicate features cast like angels, and their swaying bodies clothed in loosely flowing fabric beautifully wrought with designs both traditional and contemporary.
- Joanna Pitman for the Times of London
Hayv Kahraman began her career as a student at the "Accademia di arte e design" in Florence Italy, and eventually wound a circuitous route to arrive primarily as a painter. As a child, living in Baghdad under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the possibility of such a vocation was to her impossibly remote. Her secular parents however encouraged her to draw and imagine such possibilities within the confines of their home. When the first Gulf War created an opportunity for them to emigrate, they and their two daughters did so, through a series of intermediary countries, to eventually find themselves as citizens in Sweden. The artist comments:
Born in a land that is ironically the cradle of civilization and presently a landscape of significant human degradation, Iraq, I find myself with a cultural and personal inheritance that finds expression in my work.
A legacy of women's oppression, honor killings and war figure prominently in Kahraman's lexicon of imagery. Though at times shocking (Honor Killings, 2006), such works are ultimately, infused with the intention of the artist to be redemptive. The figures point obliquely at transcendence and self-awareness in ways that may have seemed impossible to women of an earlier generation. For instance, in her 2009 installation Denounced Ideal, Kahraman's central figure sits in an allegorical Platonic cave, gesturing upward towards escape from the golden threads that bind her. The pattern repeated in the strings echoes the Fibonacci Sequence that appears biologically in the heads of grown sunflowers. Her more recent series of Marionette paintings detail a flattened ritualistic place, lacking specificity of time and location, but seemingly referencing painting traditions from Japan, the Middle East and Italy. This series appeared in the 2009 edition of the Sharjah Biennial and reflects a journey of empathy and liberation, as Kahraman placed herself in the shoes of women discovering delicate threads of independence, negotiated from the fabric of weighty cultural traditions that might otherwise relegate them to chattel. There is also a kind of Pinocchio-like progression in the series from segmented figures clearly made of wood and adorned in flattened and patterned textiles, to fleshy swan-shaped women almost totally unencumbered by any strings.
The artist paints in oil, working on unprimed linen canvases that she prepares herself. "Using distinct two-dimensional tones of vibrant color covered with detailed designs, my figures, mainly female, appear as transformed beings with prominent timeworn eyes shaped from an ambiguous and tedious routine," comments the artist. The figures are intended to reference the archetypal swan, a creature often associated with elegance and grace, rather than suffering. In the expressiveness of their postures, these women embody both agony and gaiety.
In May, 2010, a new series of works, inspired by her own experiences as an immigrant and played out through the imagery of common playing decks of cards will contrast the lives of people embodying the Iraqi Diaspora, both before in their homeland and after in countries where they have begun new lives. Kahraman maintains an impressive calendar of exhibitions, with recent appearances in Doha, Dubai, The Sharjah Biennial and the Saatchi Gallery in London.
- Joanna Pitman for the Times of London
Hayv Kahraman began her career as a student at the "Accademia di arte e design" in Florence Italy, and eventually wound a circuitous route to arrive primarily as a painter. As a child, living in Baghdad under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the possibility of such a vocation was to her impossibly remote. Her secular parents however encouraged her to draw and imagine such possibilities within the confines of their home. When the first Gulf War created an opportunity for them to emigrate, they and their two daughters did so, through a series of intermediary countries, to eventually find themselves as citizens in Sweden. The artist comments:
Born in a land that is ironically the cradle of civilization and presently a landscape of significant human degradation, Iraq, I find myself with a cultural and personal inheritance that finds expression in my work.
A legacy of women's oppression, honor killings and war figure prominently in Kahraman's lexicon of imagery. Though at times shocking (Honor Killings, 2006), such works are ultimately, infused with the intention of the artist to be redemptive. The figures point obliquely at transcendence and self-awareness in ways that may have seemed impossible to women of an earlier generation. For instance, in her 2009 installation Denounced Ideal, Kahraman's central figure sits in an allegorical Platonic cave, gesturing upward towards escape from the golden threads that bind her. The pattern repeated in the strings echoes the Fibonacci Sequence that appears biologically in the heads of grown sunflowers. Her more recent series of Marionette paintings detail a flattened ritualistic place, lacking specificity of time and location, but seemingly referencing painting traditions from Japan, the Middle East and Italy. This series appeared in the 2009 edition of the Sharjah Biennial and reflects a journey of empathy and liberation, as Kahraman placed herself in the shoes of women discovering delicate threads of independence, negotiated from the fabric of weighty cultural traditions that might otherwise relegate them to chattel. There is also a kind of Pinocchio-like progression in the series from segmented figures clearly made of wood and adorned in flattened and patterned textiles, to fleshy swan-shaped women almost totally unencumbered by any strings.
The artist paints in oil, working on unprimed linen canvases that she prepares herself. "Using distinct two-dimensional tones of vibrant color covered with detailed designs, my figures, mainly female, appear as transformed beings with prominent timeworn eyes shaped from an ambiguous and tedious routine," comments the artist. The figures are intended to reference the archetypal swan, a creature often associated with elegance and grace, rather than suffering. In the expressiveness of their postures, these women embody both agony and gaiety.
In May, 2010, a new series of works, inspired by her own experiences as an immigrant and played out through the imagery of common playing decks of cards will contrast the lives of people embodying the Iraqi Diaspora, both before in their homeland and after in countries where they have begun new lives. Kahraman maintains an impressive calendar of exhibitions, with recent appearances in Doha, Dubai, The Sharjah Biennial and the Saatchi Gallery in London.
