Installation photo credit: Brica Wilcox

Opening reception: February 7, 2025 4pm – 6pm

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Hayv Kahraman’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Libations, on view from February 7th through March 21st, 2026.

Marking Kahraman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since her displacement resulting from the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, the artist’s newest body of work responds to an urgent question precipitated by the catastrophic events of the past year: What does one do when the world collapses? The works attempt to make sense of her experience of the fire and its enduring aftermath, while continuing her exploration of the poetics of loss, displacement, and migration. Kahraman views these works as an offering, a libation, to a burning world. The paintings invoke divination, ritual, and magic, not only in the dreamlike depictions of bodies in action, but in the materiality of their surfaces, which incorporate handmade flax and marbling techniques.

The female figures in Kahraman’s paintings are involved in mysterious and ritualistic acts –sewing a strand of tears, revealing a portal, rhythmically whirling and swinging their long hair in a circular dance. The figures act as talismans, summoning relief and protection from calamity and disaster. One talisman appearing in several of the paintings, a magic square, was painted following the instructions of one of the earliest books on Sufi magic written by Sufi master al-Būnī. With Arabic inscriptions buried in the swirling surfaces of the paintings, Kahraman references a mystical phoenix-like bird called the Anqā, who dwells at the edge of the world and is reborn through fire. Another recurring concept explored in the works is the Barzakh, an Arabic word that denotes a liminal space between the physical and the spirit world. Kahraman likens the Barzakh to the landscape of her home in Altadena, which exists in a transitional zone known as the wildland urban interface. This interstitial realm is a space of simultaneous peril and possibility – it is both a threshold to the unmitigated power of the natural world and an ecotone with profound abundance and surprising biodiversity.

Kahraman’s engagement with Sufism connects back to her mother’s lineage from the ancestral lands in the Kurdish mountains of present-day Iraq, from which she was displaced during the first Gulf War in Iraq. The mysticism of Sufi thought offered a refuge from disenchantment and a path toward reclaiming ancestral knowledge that she had been taught to mistrust. Kahraman’s newest works embrace imagination and the metaphysical as an antidote to the ravages of ecological disaster and devastating loss. The alchemical quality of the paintings underscores Kahraman’s ability to give substance to the unseen, allowing for the convergence of the material and the spiritual.

Kahraman writes further about this new body of work:

This question kept arising as I was painting: what can I offer, one year after our world was consumed by flames? Enchantment. I felt compelled to dig deep, to recover the imaginal realm, to call back wonder as a mode of survival. I sought to imbue the works with talismans and incantations, to make the unseen present.

I offer no answers. Only an invitation. An invitation to dwell at the edge where the ground trembles, where certainty loosens, where worlds are still becoming. Here, imagination walks without ground, vision shifts: sight loosens, no longer grasping to know, but opening, entering, moving through the imaginal. Here, forms dissolve and recombine, threads of light weaving new patterns, new possibilities. Time thins, the unseen stirs, and new worlds quietly begin to emerge.

Hayv Kahraman was born in 1981 in Baghdad, Iraq, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Recent solo exhibitions include Ghost Fires, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY (2025); Look Me in the Eyes, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, CA (2024), which traveled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA; The Foreign in Us, The Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX (2024); Gut Feelings: Part II, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2023); Gut Feelings, Mosaic Rooms, London, UK (2022); The Touch of Otherness, SCAD Museum of Art, GA (2022); The touch of Otherness, Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA (2021); Not Quite Human: Second Iteration, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London, UK (2020); Hayv Kahraman: Superfluous Bodies, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii, (2019); To the Land of the Waqwaq, Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Hawaii, (2019); Silence is Gold, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA  (2018); Acts of Reparation, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, MO (2017); Hayv Kahraman, The Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE (2016); Audible Inaudible, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2016); How Iraqi are You?, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY (2015).

Selected group exhibitions include; HT25 (Hawai’i Triennial 2025), Hawai’i Contemporary, O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i Island, HI (2025); Surrealism(s) – Then & Now, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2025); Ten Thousand Suns, Sydney Bienniale, Sydney, Australia (2024); Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World, The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA (2024); Women Defining Women In Contemporary Art Of The Middle East And Beyond, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, (2023); The Inescapable Intertwining of All Lives, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany (2023); Perpetual Inventory, Volume 1: An Exercise in Looking, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2022); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination, The Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Reflections contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa, The British Museum, London (2021); There Is Fiction In The Space Between, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2020); 100 Masterpieces of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, The Barjeel Collection, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (2017); Thessaloniki Biennial 5, Thessaloniki, Greece (2015); Neighbors: Contemporary Narratives from Turkey and Beyond, The Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey (2014); CONTEMPORARY: Architecture, Culture and Identity, Louisiana Museum of Modern, Humlebaek, Denmark (2013); Jameel Prize Tour, San Antonio Museum of Art (2013) and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2011); Jameel Prize Tour, Museum of Fine Art, Houston (2012); Disquieting Muses, Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece (2011); Of Women’s Modesty and Anger, Villa Empain Center for the Arts, Brussels (2011).

Her work is featured in various international collections including The Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; The Barjeel Art Foundation Sharjah, UAE; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha, Qatar; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; among others.