Hayv Kahraman
Project Series 52

2018
96 pages
English
Hardcover
6.8 x 0.6 x 9.7 inches

Publisher: Pomona College Museum of Art. DAP 2018

Text by Rebecca McGrew and Madina Tlostanova.

Los Angeles–based artist Hayv Kahraman (born 1981) creates exquisite paintings and other wall works that address diasporic cultural memory, feminine collectivity and gender identity through her personal history as an Iraqi émigré first to Europe, then to the US.

This artist's book explores how her visual language merges her biography as an immigrant in a multiplicity of styles―including Persian miniatures, Japanese illustrations and Italian Renaissance paintings―creating a discourse between Eastern “otherness” and Western concepts of beauty. The key figure in the paintings represents Kahraman as a colonized woman; the repetitive nature of her work and the act of shredding and mending presents a history of displacement, loss and trauma.