Logan Lecture: Hayv Kahraman

About This Event

Hayv Kahraman considers the body as a porous membrane, influenced and shaped by exchanges with microbial, ecological, and material worlds. Multiple conceptual threads convergence in her interdisciplinary practice, engaging concepts from the natural and biosciences as well as theories of more-than-human entanglement. Working primarily in painting, Kahraman depicts graceful and powerful women in intertwining and seemingly impossible poses. They appear like translucent apparitions with inky halos of hair and silken skin rendered delicately in layers of oil paint and adorned in geometrically patterned clothing. Together, Kahraman’s figures operate simultaneously as self-portraits and as members of a collective body, broadening our understanding of what it means to be human. Through their stylized forms and choreographed, ritual-like gestures, her figures evoke practices of care, transformation, and renewal, while opening space for queer and neurodivergent ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world. Drawing from her experience as an Iraqi émigré, first to Europe and later to the United States, Kahraman reflects on the embodied complexities of displacement and cultural translation. She examines issues of racialized gender, body politics, migrant consciousness, and the marginal spaces of diasporic life. Her recent work has explored topics such as histories of colonial botany, microbial connections between the human gut and brain, the parallels between medical terminology and military metaphors, and ecological disasters. Kahraman joins Rory Padeken, Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, in a discussion about her interdisciplinary practice.