Weaving Objects of Loss and Memory With Hayv Kahraman
When she was 11-years-old, Hayv Kahraman’s family fled the Gulf War in Iraq with only one suitcase. Among essential items, her mother packed a mahaffa, the Iraqi hand-held fan made by weaving the fronds of palm trees. It traveled with Kahraman as she made the journey from the Middle East to Europe, and decorates her family home in Sweden today. “Mahaffa for me is a nomadic object because it’s something that brings me back to the past,” Kahraman tells me at her latest exhibition, “Re-weaving Migrant Inscriptions,” at the Jackson Shainman Gallery in Manhattan. “A different life that doesn’t exist anymore.”
As in her previous exhibitions—“How Iraqi Are You” (2015) and “Let the Guest be the Master” (2013)—Kahraman’s new work is a masterful exploration of the issues of identity, personal struggle, and human consciousness. But this time she has embraced new methods of incorporating objects which carry generations of history into her pieces. Kahraman’s latest exhibition also reveals the evolution in her expression of the images and memories that haunt refugees living in the West.
From her collection, “How Iraqi Are You?” an oil on linen piece called “Kachakchi”. Image from http://www.hayvkahraman.com/ and used with permission.
Kahraman’s use of female bodies in different poses, inspired in part by the Persian and Japanese miniature, could be seen as a celebration of memory, femininity, and liberation. This multi-layered, sophisticated presentation of various complex perspectives, combined with a vivid yet soothing color palette, provides a smooth finish to her method of storytelling. Kahraman’s new work is not only touching, but it provokes lasting thoughts and feelings in any one — no matter their background.
Kahraman’s new exhibition has excelled her art into the territory of excellence in expressing some of the crucial issues of our time through consistently aesthetic and emotionally powerful paintings.