SEATTLE, WA.- Featuring all new work, Hayv Kahraman: Look Me in the Eyes explores the powerful visual and conceptual elements that are core tenets of Kahraman’s practice, while marking a momentous new phase of her career. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, the Frye’s presentation will feature additional works from the artist’s studio.

In her largest solo museum presentation to date, Kahraman (born 1981, Baghdad) balances autobiographical and collective experiences informed by her upbringing as an Iraqi/Kurdish refugee in Sweden. The new works created for the exhibition encompass an artist-designed wallpaper as well as large-scale sculptures and paintings that draw upon her longstanding motif of heavily browed, lidded eyes; female figures that are near, but not quite, self-portraits; and botanical imagery. The exhibition also debuts the artist's first audio installation, centered on a 1997 cassette tape recording of her mother appealing the rejection of the family’s application for Swedish citizenship—a painful process that Kahraman equates to being asked to “perform your refugeeism.”

Kahraman deploys recurring visual motifs to continue her interrogation of the conditions of migration and immigration in the West, exposing the simultaneous surveillance and erasure of “othered” bodies. She renders many of her figures with eyes that are blank and white, thereby empowering them to evade government tracking through iris-recognition technology to which migrants are often subjected. Elsewhere, eyes appear separated from bodies, meeting the viewer’s gaze and implicating them in social and political power structures, such as in Brick Palm No. 1 - No. 3 (2023), large-scale sculptures created for the exhibition. Individually painted and marbled bricks are stacked into columns that evoke date palm trees, a species native to Iraq dating back to ancient Mesopotamia that continues to be a culturally significant symbol of abundance and endurance. In recent years, the palms have been ravaged by war, pollution, and climate change, resulting in groves of dead trees.

Botanical imagery and materials figure throughout this new body of work as a subtle but powerful cipher for colonialism. While researching Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, Kahraman recognized the colonial hierarchies he embedded into early European understandings of plant species. The field of botany itself was propelled by the expansion of empire and grew by extracting and erasing Indigenous knowledge systems, ultimately renaming species according to nationalistic white European desires. “As a person who underwent a potent assimilation process in Sweden, I can’t help but think of these uncanny parallels between migration politics and Carl Linnaeus's plant extractions,” she explains. Kahraman refutes this western taxonomy in a new series of small watercolor and gouache paintings on flax fiber dedicated to plants native to Iraq including Berbeen (2024), Botnij (2024), and Qazwan (2024).

Kahraman visually unites these disparate elements through marbling, a centuries-old technique that forces her to relinquish artistic control. The Ebru method she uses dates to the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The patterns that emerge render each work unique—a potent metaphor for resisting assimilation and its insistence on sameness. For Kahraman, the work declares: “You cannot erase me, you cannot possess me, and even if you try, you can never remake me in your vision.”

Hayv Kahraman (born 1981) is a Kurdish-Iraqi painter whose work primarily deals with the body politics of migrant consciousness. Often blended with her personal history as a refugee to Europe and ultimately to the United States, she creates a unique visual language that reflects her nomadic background and challenges various notions of hegemonic control.

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; and 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. Kahraman was shortlisted for the 2011 Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum and has received the Excellence in Cultural Creativity award from the Global Thinkers Forum.