In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with painter Hayv Kahraman.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with Iraqi born, Los Angeles based artist Hayv Kahraman...
About Artist Hayv Kahraman:
Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981, now lives and works in Los Angeles. A vocabulary of narrative, memory and dynamics of non-fixity found in diasporic cultures are the essence of her visual language and the product of her experience as an Iraqi refugee/come émigré. The body as object and subject have a central role in her painting practice as she compositely embodies the artist herself and a collective.
Kahraman’s recent solo exhibitions include; “Acts of Reparation“, CAM St Louis; “Audible Inaudible“, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha; “Sound Wounds“, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; “Gendering Memories of Iraq- a Collective Performance” which has been staged at CAM St Louis, Birmingham Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins museum of art and Duke University; “Reweaving Migrant Inscriptions” Jack Shainman, New York; “Audible Inaudible“, The Third Line gallery, Dubai; “How Iraqi are you?“, Jack Shainman, New York. Recent group exhibitions include: “No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection”, Miami; “UNREALISM: Presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch”, Miami Design District; “June: A Painting Show”, Sadie Coles HQ, London. Hayv was shortlisted for the 2011 Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum and has received the award “Excellence in Cultural Creativity”, Global Thinkers Forum.
Visit Hayv's Website: HayvKahraman.com
Follow Hayv on Instagram: @HayvKahraman
For more on Hayv's exhibition, "Look Me In The Eyes" at the ICA San Francisco, CLICK HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2024-0305 - AIA - EP020 - Hayv Kahraman
Artist Hayv Kahraman: [00:00:00] I am a person who has survived domestic violence. I am a war refugee. You know, I'm a person who has had the need to really control my environment. And marbling is something that refuses to be controlled, right? Because of this, it's unpredictability.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Hayv Karhaman. On how learning to marble was therapeutic for her.
Welcome to Art is Awesome. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts. And I've been meeting such great people that I created this bi weekly podcast to highlight their work.
Art is Awesome is now carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco [00:01:00] on Fridays at 9am and 7pm. You can listen live or stream it there.
Hayv Kahraman was born in Iraq and immigrated with her family to Sweden in 1992 during the Iran Iraq war when she was 10. Her new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, Look Me in the Eyes. is deeply personal, like the rest of her work. In it, botany and colonialism, eyes and surveillance, and marbling and letting go of control, come up again and again.
Along with paintings, the show also has sculpture representing dead palm trees made of bricks with eyes, and a sound piece of Hayv's late mother.
Archive Audio Clip: What else we have apart from our identity? I mean, identity, my identity is my personal precious thing I have. This is something I am born with.[00:02:00]
Host Emily Wilson: Hayv lives in Los Angeles. She has shown work in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Third Line Gallery in Dubai. We met at the ICA. Many of the paintings in this show are marbled using a Turkish technique of dipping paper into liquid. A lot of the work, while beautiful, is also disturbing. Showing women staring blankly, their eyes milky white.
The exhibition also includes delicate botanical studies of Iraqi plants. In our conversation, Hayv talked about rethinking the legacy of Carl Linnaeus, considered the father of botany, getting her first show at a gallery. And how marbling forces her to relinquish control. The audio is a recording of a cassette tape her mother made when she was denied citizenship in Sweden, because she couldn't prove she was who she said she was.
Archive Audio Clip: Do you know what it feels like, [00:03:00] how frustrating it is.
I'm sure you know, I'm sure you know how it feels like, because you're a human being, as much as I am, a human being, who has feelings.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: This is a 49 year-old woman being told, I don't believe you are who you are, right? And my mom is very passionate, I mean, I think, and a super creative person. And she could not let that go, right? So she hired a lawyer and she recorded her voice pleading to the immigration office in Sweden to believe her, to Give her a chance at one point in the audio. She says, well, if you don't believe me, come cut my skin and take a cell out of my body. Right? So there are many, [00:04:00]many layers in that audio piece.
And it's sort of like. Her own performance.
Host Emily Wilson: In one painting, a woman pops an eyeball into her socket. In another, three female figures are squatting by a plant, plucking eyes off it, with one putting an eyeball in her mouth. It takes you a while to notice that the woman don't have irises.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: It was a revelation for me too because I started painting these figures without irises, not knowing why.
And this was around the time that I discovered my mom's cassette tape and when I started researching immigration and border regimes and border control and surveillance, right? And every single figure would lack an iris. And I'd have people come to the studio and say, why is that? And I, I just, I wasn't able to explain why.
Host Emily Wilson: The reason dawned on her later.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: My cousin [00:05:00] works with incoming refugees from Afghanistan. So Afghani, sorry, younger minors actually, and a lot of them remove their fingerprints by cutting, by pouring acid, by sandpapering in any, any, any way that they can circumvent being traced by this centralized database in Europe.
It's called the EuroDAX system, right? It's a very violent act, this kind of removing your pieces of your body, right, in order to circumvent that erasure.
Host Emily Wilson: Doing research, Have found something equally disturbing.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: Nowadays, border patrol actually scan irises as well. This is a newish technology. So I thought, okay, that's when it clicked, right?
It's like, I'm basically using these refugee tactics and the [00:06:00] works, right, of saying, You know, a lot of my older work, there's, there's, um, there's sort of a reversal of the gaze. You know, you have the figure looking back at you and, um, there's a subversion that happens and it's, and there's a power and agency that then I would like to believe this figure kind of inherits, right?
I think in these works, I take it a step further in saying, well, no, there is no looking back. I refuse to be completely. Transparent and reveal my entire self to you.
Host Emily Wilson: Hayv does lots of reading and investigation to make her art.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: Research is an integral part of the way I work. I think the way I, uh, enter into researching a particular field or topic is, it's very organic, right?
It happens sort of like, Oh, you know, I stumbled upon a [00:07:00] blog where somebody was talking about Linnaeus, um, and colonial botany and maybe it triggers something inside me. You know, there's a, there's a feeling that happens that, um, an urgency that I feel like I need to sort of explore. And usually that's how I approach research.
Um, And it's extensive because once you start getting into something, it can lead to many, many, you know, other fields. Um, but it's also really exciting. And I think I'm not the kind of artist who sort of just picks up a brush and, and, and just paints. Right. I love artists who do that. And I really admire it. But for me, for me, that's not enough.
Host Emily Wilson: Carl Linnaeus, who Hayv just mentioned, is an 18th century Swede who invented a system to classify plants. Hayv remembers seeing statues of him when she lived in Sweden, and she considered [00:08:00] him a hero. Then a couple years ago, she read a blog about him and his system,
Artist Hayv Kahraman: I remember being taught about Linnaeus's work and legacy.
And I remember the statues. I, we, I even remember we took a field trip once to Uppsala at his, um, this is, this is his botanical garden. And I remember walking, you know, there and sort of being in awe, right. And seeing the statue and complete admiration for this, you know, white European man. I just completely sort of unaware of that kind of being in a, under the spell of coloniality. Right. And the blog was just, I don't even know, I don't remember how I came across it. It must have been a year and a half, maybe two years ago. Um, and it was, you know, very, it was very beautifully written, very simple and sort of just. Direct, right, in saying, I'm [00:09:00] talking about the sexual system that Linnaeus came up with, uh, and the binomial nomenclature and the problematics behind it.
And it sort of dawned on me, okay, wow, you know, I've been sort of brainwashed into thinking a certain way. And that's, uh, That's really where I wanted to, to dig into the research of, well, who really was this man? Right? What did he write about and what, how, what was the language? How was he as a person, you know, and the implications of his legacy, of course.
Host Emily Wilson: Researching Linnaeus led Hayv to marbling, which he has done in many of the paintings in this show.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: I live 10 minutes from the Huntington Pasadena. You know, I researched them and I found out that they hold, they have a lot of his, um, rare books of Linnaeus's rare books. So I thought, okay, I need to go there and touch and feel this book and, you know, open the pages and really read [00:10:00] and sort of be there in that space and that sort of intimate space with that book.
Right. So I, I got, you know, I, I got a library card and I went there and I, um, I opened the Hortus Cliffortianus, which is one of his, uh, very famous books, um, that has a lot of also botanical illustrations. And as I opened the book, the first front piece is marbled. And it's a beautifully marbled piece. And I had at that time, prior to visiting the Huntington, I was following these, um, Turkish marbles on Instagram and it's really satisfying.
It's one of those things where you say you can watch forever, right? When they marble, uh, I was really mesmerized, but it kind of just stopped there. Right? Um, but as I saw the, the marbled Fronts in line's book, that's when it sort of [00:11:00] clicked. Marbling frees her, Haif says. As an artist, you tend to sort of, you make a body of work, and you're so absorbed in this, and you're so like obsessed, and you make, make, make, make, make, and then you end up making more and a little too much, right?
And then you sort of get bored, and it becomes very static. That's how I feel. So I think marbling helped me move beyond that. It opened a lot of doors. practically, like within the process of making art, but also internally. I am a person who has survived domestic violence. I am a war refugee. You know, I'm a person who has had the need to really control my environment.
And I think that's apparent in the work and marbling is something that Uh, refuses to be controlled, right? Because [00:12:00] of this, it's unpredictability. I mean, I can sort of regulate like, okay, I want, you know, a marbled surface on this side of the canvas that I can control. Anything else is just completely unpredictable in terms of the outcome, right?
You know, relinquishing that control is very, very freeing and incredibly therapeutic.
Host Emily Wilson: Hayv never went to art school, although she did take a course in graphic design in Italy. Her entry into the art world came after she moved to the States in 2006.
Artist Hayv Kahraman: Around that time, it was the height of the sectarian violence here in Iraq, right?
So I remember feeling incredible guilt that I was moving to this country that is like currently at war with my own and, you know, there's all of these feelings of why am I here and I felt I was troubled, right? So I started painting a lot more. And drawing a lot more. And so I, you know, made this kind of collection of paintings, smaller paintings.[00:13:00]
I put them in a little portfolio and I traveled to Dubai with my mom and we went from gallery to gallery and, you know, I showed them my work. One gallery in Dubai, third line gallery. And this was 2006, seven, when Dubai was sort of. You know, the, the, the art scene was really in its infancy, but it was growing, right?
People were really interested and eager, um, to see art. And the Third Line Gallery said, you know what? This is amazing. Uh, we want to put you in a group show. And that's how it all started.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show where I asked the same three questions to find out more about the person they are. When did you know you were an artist? What was some work that made an impact on you and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Hayv Kahraman: When did I know that [00:14:00] I was an artist? I don't know how to answer that because, because I mean, if anything, I've sort of always felt like, An artist in, in the sense of, you know, an artist being somebody who is creative or maybe thinks a little bit differently about the world, about things around them, or maybe sees things in a different way, or draws connections that, that might seem completely unrelated. So I think my answer would be always.
In Baghdad, I remember our home we had, we had wonderful a lot of posters of surrealist artists, so there was a lot of Dali, there was a lot of Magritte, and I think being in a place that is plagued by war, you know, essentially my entire life until the age of 10 when I [00:15:00] left, seeing these paintings really allowed me to dream and to envision and to dream otherwise.
You know, that there were openings and opportunities and I could really sort of be creative. Like there were no restrictions. And I'm so grateful that I have that because I think, you know, as a child, like you need to have an outlet somewhere.
The most creatively inspiring place I would say would be the ocean or sort of any body of water. I think I really respond to, well, actually, no, that's not true. I like the ocean because there's that. There's the roaring of the waves and there's something about hearing the waves and it just really feels like you're connecting to a larger self or a universe. It feels very spiritual.
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks so much for listening to Art is Awesome. And thank you to Hayv Karaman, our guest. Her show, Look Me in the Eyes, is at the ICA San Francisco. On Minnesota street through May 19th. You can find out more in our show notes, please subscribe and rate us and join us next time for a conversation with Maymanah Farhat. I have said this show is conversations with artists and art workers. And at long last, I'm having an art worker as a guest. Maymanah curated a show at the center for the book in San Francisco, A Radical Alteration. It's about the women's studio workshop An artist collective that's been around for 50 years. Maymanah is an art historian who specializes in artists books, as well as contemporary [00:17:00] Arab art.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at artisawesomepodcast or visit our website. Till next [00:18:00]time.