Hayv Kahraman’s Provocative New Paintings Express Trauma and Healing

The Iraqi American artist Hayv Kahraman doesn’t have many vivid recollections of her childhood, but there is 1 that stands out. Growing up in Baghdad during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War, she remembers how her mom and dad authorized her and her younger sister to freely paint the doors, ceiling, and partitions of what they termed the “play room” in their household.

“Saying to a 9-year-old that you can paint wherever in this total space, it was just all the things,” she informed Artsy from Los Angeles, where by she is based mostly. “Imagine dwelling in a space where you can not just be you. You have to be knowledgeable of almost everything all around you, simply because if you are not you can actually be killed. So to have that type of freedom in that context was emancipatory. It intended a great deal and I think that was the initially drive in the direction of where I wanted to go.”

She also recalls how she and her mom would dip their paint brushes into the coloured and salty liquid of torshi (fermented pickled greens) and paint away on paper. That personalized memory has been recreated on a bigger scale as an installation on a wall, as element of her hottest exhibition, “Gut Thoughts: Section II,” at The 3rd Line in Dubai, now on view by March 24th (element just one was held at The Mosaic Rooms, London, in 2022). The artist offers a range of provocative paintings and drawings that tap into trauma and therapeutic, expressed as a result of figures actually grappling with the intestine, an crucial organ that has an effect on the human psyche.

In essence, the exhibit was influenced by Kahraman’s late mom, who was a naturopath, researching normal techniques of healing. “She had her own trauma. She was actively hoping to heal,” reported the artist.

In 2020, immediately after her mom handed absent in Sweden, wherever the relatives took refuge in 1992, Kahraman was clearing out her mother’s individual belongings when she found a e-book on a phrase she’d never ever heard of prior to: Neurosculpting. “It’s a science in which you can rewire the neural pathways in your brain,” stated Kahraman. “You truly have the skill to unlearn traumatic designs or any problems you have endured, and then resculpt them.”

Kahraman identified herself investigating this eye-opening matter, foremost to the intestine, which is typically dubbed as the “second brain.” The brain is connected to the intestine, which is total of tens of millions of neurons and its inner bacteria—though unwanted to most—“regulates the hormones that handle our emotions,” in accordance to exhibitions’s push launch.

The artist explained that she has found “an ally with germs,” tying them to the notions of difference and otherness, which have been section of her existence expertise. And so the intestine turned a central and symbolic motif in Kahraman’s new physique of figurative paintings, depicted as entanglements—long, twisted lengths of intestines. Some are painted in black, whereas some others are rendered making use of pale pink torshi liquid.

Doing work on this series for the past a few a long time has been a cathartic working experience for the artist, who herself has dealt with trauma, displacement, and violence from the age of 10 onwards. For Kahraman, choosing up the paintbrush is a variety of therapy and release, a way to function by what she had endured.

Fleeing Iraq at a younger age, Kahraman and her spouse and children were refugees, who manufactured their way to Sweden, thanks to pretend passports presented by a smuggler. She tried to healthy in in Swedish society, like bleaching her hair. Later, she located herself in the midst of an abusive relationship. “You carry that abuse silently in your entire body, but it came out in the do the job,” she reported of her before items. “I could not see it at the time. I had some folks occur up to me and say, ‘Are you okay?’”

“Painting is the way that I speak,” Kahraman explained. “This complete entire body of function started off out to somehow, possibly naively, uncover some sort of utopian way to get to healing. But as I started out creating them, I began realizing it’s not about the endpoint, it is definitely about the system of portray.…Finding pleasure in the approach versus seeking to arrive at an conclusion goal—that’s what I figured out.…If there was any huge lesson for me it was most likely staying existing in these entanglements and becoming ok with that discomfort.”

In the paintings of “Gut Emotions: Portion II,” displayed on The Third Line’s two floors, the viewer arrives across a common feminine protagonist that has lengthy been existing in Kahraman’s oeuvre. She has black hair, from time to time a thick unibrow or a mustache, dressed in apparel with sensitive geometric designs, a nod to the artist’s heritage. “I think it is a way for me to be nearer to home, but I do obtain that it provides composition to the painting,” she stated. “In the new function, a great deal of the styles are generally impressed by Kurdish rugs that are woven by nomadic girls. Just about every image has a that means. A whole lot of the symbols that I have taken signify fertility, life, womanhood, appreciate.”

Her do the job has also been influenced by illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance, and Persian miniature painting, as very well as the Baghdad School of Miniature Paintings, stretching back to the 12th century.

The entanglements are developed in a surreal way, the place they float atop the protagonist’s head (as viewed in Mind clean, 2022) and appear out of the mouth, as if to get it out of one’s method. Elsewhere, 3 women of all ages are pulling the entanglements from looming eyes, and octopus tentacles arise from a woman’s breasts.