Hayv Kahraman

About

Hayv Kahraman is a Kurdish-Iraqi contemporary artist born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1981. Fleeing Baghdad at age eleven due to war, she relocated with her family to Sweden as refugees, an experience that profoundly shaped her artistic practice focusing on migrant consciousness, violence against women, gender identity, and diasporic cultural memory. She studied graphic design at the Accademia di arte e design di Firenze in Italy, graduating in 2005, before moving to the United States in 2006, where she now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her interdisciplinary work draws from Italian Renaissance, Japanese woodcuts, Persian miniatures, and Iraqi architecture, often featuring fragmented female figures with geometric patterns, exploring themes of displacement, body politics, and the third space between Western and Middle Eastern cultures.[1][2][3][4][5]

Contemporary surrealism blending figurative painting with geometric patterns, fragmentation, and influences from Renaissance, Japanese woodcuts, and Iraqi architecture