The public is invited to a free performance coordinated by artist Hayv Kahraman that reflects on being displaced from one’s home and the immigrant experience.

Kahraman left her native Iraq when she was eleven years old in the midst of the first Gulf War. She roots her work in this transformative experience, contemplating what she calls a “migrant consciousness.” Kahraman's iconography draws on art historical traditions, including Renaissance painting, illuminated manuscripts, and Japanese woodblock printing, as well as illustrations found in contemporary wartime propaganda and combat manuals. In Kahraman’s paintings, the eastern and western worlds collide, and the female body is caught in the crosshairs. She attributes her fascination with the human form in part to having been raised in an Arab culture, where women’s bodies are contested and politicized, yet she explains that moving to the United States as an adult was also formative in the development of her language.


"My process begins by narrating personal memories that unarguably are specific yet could be part of a collective history.  The self is used as a formal/lingual vehicle to communicate and share the life/lives of other/s.  I am concerned with the multitude not the self.  This is not only my story. It can be the story of more than 5 million people within the Iraqi diaspora or any diaspora.  I do not intend to generalize.  It is merely a re-creation of what I have experienced and what I see people around me experiencing.  This is her story but it is also her and her and her and her story."

What's pictured: Hayv Kahraman, Shield 2, 2016, oil on linen and acoustic foam, 35 x 35 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York,
© Hayv Kahraman.