Hayv Kahraman
She has no name
Pilar Corrias, London

Hayv Kahraman draws not only from her Kurdish-Iraqi background, but from her experience as an émigré—first to Sweden and then to the United States (where she is currently based)—in order to undermine structures of knowledge and assumptions of otherness propagated by colonial histories and racial prejudice. At Pilar Corrias gallery in London, her paintings fused recurring motifs of the feminine body, colonial legacies, and personal migrant histories with her new marbling technique and her research on botanical naming systems built upon the foundations established by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). 

Barbeen on black (2024), depicts isolated stems of barbeen used in Iraqi cuisine taped to marbled wallpaper. The inclusion of the plant’s Arabic name in the title, and the explicit reference to colonial practices of botanical species collection and compartmentalization, point to the systemic stripping away of the plant’s context in its native environment and questions the celebration of Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, whereby plants are given Latin names according to a structure determined by European naturalists.