In this episode Amal discusses Hayv Kahraman. She is a student journalist with us on a placement organised by the Oxford University Career Services. This article was self edited.
🎧 listen to Amal's backstory here - she discusses her motivation & research as well.
Amal also wrote a short 2 min read article about Hayv Kahraman with a summary inforgraphic.
Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi-Kurdish artist whose art explores themes of identity, displacement, and gender. She was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1961 to a Kurdish family. Her childhood was deeply impacted by the Iran-Iraq war and she recalls ‘clinging to [her] mother in the basement of [her] uncle’s house’ waiting for the noises of bombardment to stop. During the first Gulf War at age eleven, her family relocated to Sweden as refugees. They left in the night and hired a smuggler to aid their journey.
As a child in Sweden, she found it difficult to fit in with her classmates. Despite her best attempts to assimilate by learning the language, she found that her physical appearance and her refugee identity acted as a barrier. She said that she realised, “I’d always be the other person who carried her native home with her. I’d always be the refugee.”
Kahraman’s identity is reflected in her art and her works are often semi-autobiographical. She engages with different mediums including painting, drawing, and sculpture. One of Kahraman’s collections is titled Waraq, meaning paper in Arabic. She saw the five million Iraqi immigrants as a scattered deck of cards, each with their own story. The collection consists of ten printed playing cards. The figure in the card titled Migrant 3 is actively cutting her tongue, representing the loss of language and communication that immigrants face in their host country as experienced by Kahraman. Migrant 1 represents the more than twelve thousand women who were killed in honour killings in Northern Iraq from 1991 - 2007.
She currently lives and works in California.
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