Hayv Kahraman

Creating a discourse between Eastern otherness and Western concepts of beauty

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 emigre 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. The book includes never-before-published images of the artist’s work and her performance texts, plus new essays and poetry.