Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi-Kurdish artist whose first exhibition in Texas, The Foreign in Us, is currently on display at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University in Houston. Organised by the museum’s curator Frauke V. Josenhans, the solo exhibition explores the artist’s heritage and her personal history as a refugee raised in Sweden, confronting the fear and paranoia that is far too often meted to those seeking a haven. Josenhans joins STIR to discuss Kahraman’s practice and how it speaks to the artist’s lived experience.

Discussing the contorted bodies of Kahraman’s protagonists, Josenhans tells STIR, “Hayv Kahraman’s work consists of various layers, literally and figuratively, that draw from her own personal experience as a refugee. She depicts human figures in various postures that at times seem unnatural and even mannerist, characterised by an extreme distortion of the physical body. The intertwined limbs of the depicted figures create structures not unlike architectural features that evolve in an unidentified space without any tangible context." She explains that Kahraman’s figures tend to stare directly at the viewer, as though they are issuing a challenge of sorts: to not look away, and to engage with them, building a connection between our world and theirs. There is a clear parallel that one may draw here, to refugees seeking to connect with the citizenry of the nations they flee to.

Kahraman was born in Baghdad in 1981 and her family fled to Sweden with the assistance of a hired smuggler in the aftermath of the Gulf War (1990-1991). She would go on to study in Italy before coming to live and work in the United States. As Josenhans explains, “Hayv Kahraman’s multifaceted work echoes her migratory experience. Questions around gender, memory and diaspora inform her subject matter, compositions and material approach. Kahraman’s art is an act of getting the viewer involved, of questioning our own behaviour…Through her works, she advocates for tolerance and acceptance of what we might consider different or ‘foreign'."

While the works being shown at the Moody Center for the Arts reflect the artist’s journey, and the features of her protagonists are modelled after her own, Josenhans makes it a point to mention that these are not self-portraits. Kahraman’s focus is a wider human experience, hinted at by her repetitive depiction of human bodies—at once deeply personal and resoundingly universal.

Kahraman’s figures are filled with a resilience that shines through her compositions and is magnified by their unyielding gazes. Along similar lines, the artist’s depiction of hair plays an important role in her works and Kahraman treats this as an extension of her characters’ free will and untameable natures: their hair is often painted to seem wild, almost as though it has a will of its own, which it exercises to defy traditional Western canons of feminine beauty.

With her powerful visual language, Kahraman counters any attempt to categorise her work, to reduce it to only her experience as a refugee. – Frauke V. Josenhans, Curator, Moody Center for the Arts

The presence of a bomb in Say Ahh (2021) is a disquieting reminder of the events that led to Kahraman’s life as a refugee: the extensive aerial campaign led by the United States Air Force (USAF) during the Gulf War saw nearly 90,000 tons of munitions detonated across Iraqi soil. This caused human and material destruction that is difficult to quantify or even comprehend. At the same time, Kahraman’s art militates against the standards of beauty projected onto women in Euro-American art and against efforts to contain women, perhaps more globally. Josenhans ends her interview with STIR, saying, “With her powerful visual language, Kahraman counters any attempt to categorise her work, to reduce it to only her experience as a refugee.” Going beyond the ongoing art exhibition, the Moody Center for the Arts will be releasing a catalogue in May 2024 to highlight Kahraman’s bold practice further, and its exploration of “otherness”, which audiences of The Foreign in Us will eagerly look forward to.

'The Foreign in Us' is on at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Texas until May 11, 2024.