The Collection

Hayv Kahraman is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist whose paintings, sculptures, and performances investigate gendered body politics, displacement, and the experience of diasporic life. Drawing from her own history as an Iraqi refugee and émigré, Kahraman uses the female form—at once self-portrait and collective body—as a site to question colonial legacies, migration, and the structures of power that shape visibility. Her figures, often depicted in ritualized or contorted poses, evoke Renaissance and Persian miniature painting while exploring memory, trauma, and cultural hybridity.

Working primarily on linen, Kahraman employs techniques such as slicing, layering, and weaving fibers into her surfaces, merging material experimentation with figurative imagery. Recent series extend her inquiry into intersections with science, ecology, and immunology, reflecting on how narratives of the body echo wider discourses around migration, militarism, and survival.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (2024), Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2024–25), Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University (2024), Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art (Honolulu), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha), and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, among others. Group exhibitions include the Biennale of Sydney (2024), Rose Art Museum (2025), British Museum (2021), and Thessaloniki Biennale (2015).

Kahraman studied at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and Umeå University (Sweden). Her work is held in major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Art; North Carolina Museum of Art; Rubell Family Collection; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and the British Museum, London.