Jack Shainman Gallery
Hayv Kahraman
Ghost Fires
September 11 – October 25, 2025
513 West 20th Street, New York
Jack Shainman Gallery is honored to present Ghost Fires, an exhibition of new work by Hayv Kahraman, the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Informed by Kahraman’s longstanding exploration of displacement, this new body of work is also a response to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and their direct effect on Kahraman and her family. In a text written specifically for the exhibition and included here in full, Kahraman reflects on the ongoing process of understanding these events and continuing to find meaning in the world around her.
Hayv Kahraman:
The chemical stench of the toxins left behind by the fire in my home in Altadena made it hard to breathe, but I was determined to find what I had left behind before fleeing: Etel Adnan’s book, The Arab Apocalypse. Adnan once said of the sun, “Because the sun is dangerous it can kill you—burn you. But the sun is also life.”
Don’t look up at the sun, we are told. Our irises burned, scraped, abraded—like the migrants burning their fingerprints to evade border police. Burning the traces on your fingers to circumvent erasure. Édouard Glissant comes to mind as I think of burning irises seizing the right to be illegible. The paradox is damning. This is a story that mingles in the interstices of decay and fecundity. In the unseen realms of jinn and spirit. In the Anqa; an illusory female bird who induces renewal and resurrection by burning herself in a nest of palm fronds.
One of the many erasures my body has had to contend with after becoming a refugee in the west is of an embodied connection to sentient and non sentient kin. To be connected with the ecologies I touch and to whom I am touched by. To be attuned to what Gloria Anzaldúa named as spirit and what I think of as jinn. Did the jinn originate from the flames of the sun descending on the planet to live unseen with us humans?
Depression after the fires has made my dissociation palpable and infuriating. I felt severed from my body. You stole my connection to my ancestors. To my ghosts and jinns and dreams. To my place of birth and the cosmologies it houses. To my wind. How do you paint the wind? I’ve been obsessing about this for many years. Wind is movement, change and life. Wind is also fire. If change is God, like Octavia Butler says, then wind is also God. To celebrate the birth of each year, we dance around fires in west Asia. My ancestors worshiped fire.
Can I be intuitive—clairvoyant—even as the rational, patriarchal voice in my head demands proof? How can I birth and be in ceremony with my painting without justifying its existence in this place? Like an asylum seeker justifying her pain to the immigration officer.
My own ghost fires began showing up in my paintings months before the fires in Los Angeles. “Nature is at war with itself,” Adnan says. The womb is burning like in the story I was told as a child in West Asia. An eschatological tale of an entangled, more-than-human, cascading event ignited when a small ‘pest’—the flea—slips into a tannour oven and explodes. The death of the flea affects all other sentient beings on the planet. Ending apocalyptically with the mother, sitting on a hot saj, burning her womb.
I am reminded of what my people say: we have no friends but the mountains. This is why I chose this house, because of its proximity to the mountains—that are now barren and charred. Today is the shadow of tomorrow. War refugee, climate refugee. Now what? How can I re-member my connection to this land? Can the ghost fires be generative? The womb is furiously burning like the volcano in Hawaii and it will smolder even once the fires are extinguished. Just like the endless burn pits left in Iraq releasing toxins that our winds bring to us. This is what war does. It silently haunts.
A few weeks after the fires, I returned to my house. The cacti in the yard had bloomed wildly. I had never seen them this healthy and yet, across the street, everything was ash. It became glaringly obvious to me then that this devastation also brought life, perhaps even the emergence of another world. Parallel to this nascent world are the ghost fires that haunt me as I replay the few memories my mind has chosen to keep of the war, in my body, today, in LA. They haunt me so that I re-member. For how can I dream of an emergent world if I close my eyes to the ghosts around me?
About Hayv Kahraman
Hayv Kahraman (b. Baghdad, Iraq; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist whose practice addresses racialized gender and body politics, migrant consciousness, and the marginal spaces of diasporic life. Drawing from her personal history as an Iraqi émigré, first to Europe, then to the U.S., Kahraman explores the body as a methodology for complicating dominant narratives of what it means to be human today. Kahraman’s approach to painting is interdisciplinary, thinking with the natural and biosciences and in more than human interminglings. Multiple thought nodes coalesce in each body of work in the attempt to expose colonial logics and bridge plural voices and imaginaries. Her figures, which she considers both as self-portraits and part of a broader collective, challenge traditional norms and demand different investigations of power. The figures enact performative and ritualistic movements alluding to practices of care and renewal. At its core, Kahraman’s work reflects on the process of Othering, exploring the gap between the immigrant, gendered subject and the normative gaze of a white, heteropatriarchal society.
Displacement has long been central to Hayv’s practice, made even more relevant by the recent Los Angeles wildfires that left her family without a livable home. Her recent body of work, Ghost Fires, explores the intertwined forces of ecocidal destruction, memory, and regeneration. These works began before the fires and now feel uncannily prophetic. Inspired in part by a dystopian childhood fable, these new pieces, featuring marbled fibers, linen spirals, and scorched eyes, reflect what Kahraman calls “reworlding”: an act of remembering, reimagining, and reclaiming.
Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her recent solo exhibitions are at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2024) and the ICA San Francisco (2024), which traveled to the Frye Museum in Seattle, WA (2024-25). Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, Honolulu, HI; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE. Her work was be featured in group exhibitions including Surrealism(s) – Then & Now at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2025); Hawai’i Triennial 2025: ALOHA NŌ at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI (2025); From Cindy Sherman to Francesco Vezzoli: 80 Contemporary Artists at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy (2025); and Ten Thousand Suns, The 24th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2024). Her work is included in several public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; North Carolina Museum of Art; the Rubell Family Collection; the British Museum, London; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
