Hayv Kahraman is known for her multifaceted practice, which encompasses painting, performance, and sculpture. Her work addresses radicalized gender and body politics, migrant consciousness, and the marginal spaces of diasporic life, drawing from her personal history as an Iraqi émigré first to Europe and then the United States. Kahraman’s canvases feature female figures that she describes as extensions of her own body; however, these women are not meant to exist as self-portraits. Rather, Kahraman views the figures as embodiments of a collective experience and reflections of the brown body indoctrinated into whiteness, representative of her effort to challenge the colonial legacy and dismantle European ideals. The struggle of displacement is further amplified through the disfigurement and violation that often afflicts her subjects. 

Kahraman’s work is ultimately a reflection on Othering as a method of dehumanization and erasure, as she examines the gap between the immigrant gendered subject and its perception by the white, hetero-patriarchal, normative same. From this position of acute otherness, the body can become a site of confrontation, resistance, and liberation, rewritten as a site of decolonial healing and survival. While questions of diaspora and gender catalyze Kahraman’s work, she continues to explore and shift her artistic style, incorporating techniques such as marbling and using new materials like flax linen and torshi. Fascinated by geometry and systems of symmetry, Kahraman often incorporates mirroring and abstract patterns into her compositions.

Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Look Me in the Eyes, ICA SF, San Francisco (2024); The Foreign in Us, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024); Ten Thousand Suns, Sydney Biennale 2024, Australia (2024); The inescapable interweaving of all lives, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2023); O Quilombismo, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (2023); The Touch of Otherness, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Ga. (2022); and Gut Feelings, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022). Kahraman’s work is in several important international collections including the British Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami; The Barjeel Art Foundation Sharjah, UAE; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, N.C.; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.