In Hayv Kahraman’s ‘Ghost Fires,’ Grief Becomes a Living Ritual

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1589106 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/JSG20-HK-Ghost-Fires-2025-v1.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A single painting of a woman with smoke rising from her mouth hangs on a white gallery wall." width="970" height="727" data-caption='Hayv Kahraman’s “Ghost Fires” is at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York through October 25. <span class=”media-credit”>© Hayv Kahraman. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio</span>’>

Luminous yet ominous, Hayv Kahraman’s work radiates an archetypal force, drawing on ancient symbolism to confront the contemporary condition and timeless existential questions about humanity’s place within the entropic cycle of the universe. Her work explores personal and collective stories of displacement, diasporic disorientation and cultural fracture, evoked through mysterious choreographies of feminine bodies drifting in suspended, liminal spaces—as if they are both inhabiting discomfort and, at the same time, finding within that fluidity a freer, more open space of possibility. Contorted and distorted, her figures expand rhizomatically across the canvas, their formations echoing mandalas or branching like trees, suggesting growth with no fixed direction but nonetheless attuned to some universal order.

While Kahraman’s work has often been interpreted through the narrow lens of her personal history as an Iraqi émigré—first to Europe, then to the U.S.—her show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York reaches toward something far more universal. Here, the feminine body becomes a portal: its gestures and gravitational motions converge around energetic centers, channeling unseen flows and enacting quiet rituals of connection to dimensions both within and beyond the body.

“Portals are something I’ve been thinking about,” Kahraman tells Observer, but she confesses that she was not sure if she was consciously aware of it at the time. “It’s one of those things I only discovered after the fact. When I realized it, I saw that this is a very different way of working.”

Though her work appears epiphanic, as if born solely of vision and intuition, Kahraman’s process follows a rigorous methodology rooted in drawing, structure and control. Over the years, she has built her own visual lexicon and compositional system, shaped by the rational discipline she absorbed while studying in Sweden after fleeing Iraq and by the symbolic geometry she encountered in Florence, grounded in the Renaissance ideal of universal harmony. Hearing this, it becomes clear how her art enacts the challenge of making these disparate parts coexist within a single image, alongside the cultural and symbolic tropes she channels. The repetition of her figures also suggests an artistic practice that has evolved into a form of meditation and personal ritual—one through which visions rising from the subconscious are filtered, organized and refined.

“I’m very systematic in the way I work. There are always months of research behind it—I’m not your typical painter,” she says. “I read constantly, and I can’t think of a time when I haven’t anchored the work in a literary text or a scholarly concept that I’ve become obsessed with. I lose myself in that research, and the ideas, the work itself, really take shape in dialogue with those texts.” Yet grounding her work in literary references and self-devised structures may also be a way to contain the entropic nature of her expansive, mythopoetic practice—as if these archetypal presences ultimately surfaced and flowed onto the canvas beyond rational control.

She admits that dismantling rigid frameworks and discovering the potential in surrendering to something primordial—bound to an ancestral dimension already within her—was something she was able to do, perhaps for the first time, with this show. “There was more of a channeling of something that was happening in these works. I don’t know if I allowed myself to go there in the past,” she considers. “Before, I was more controlled in it, but with these works I felt some blocks had lifted—blocks I had placed on myself without even realizing it.” For Kahraman, this was less a conscious decision than a discovery. “I think part of the reason I adopted those blocks goes back to my own history. I fled Iraq and became a refugee in Sweden, where I grew up and entered the Swedish school system, and I think that shaped me in ways I’m still uncovering.”

The recurring feminine figures she paints emerged toward the end of her time in Italy, just as she was preparing to move to the United States. Life circumstances made Arizona the next destination in her journey. The move, however, came with deep ambivalence. She had never been to the U.S. and had little desire to go, and the timing—2005 or 2006, at the height of sectarian violence in Iraq—made the relocation all the more fraught. “I remember thinking, what am I doing moving to a country that’s at war with my own?” she recalls. Those conflicting thoughts remained, even as she tried to set them aside. “This figure has become a kind of methodology for me to work through certain ideas” and a symbolic presence through which she could process grief and trauma, reframing them into new narratives of herself and the world around her.

Kahraman acknowledged that the characters in her work could easily be seen as alter egos, given their resemblance to her own body. The process often began with filming herself in motion and using those recordings as the basis for drawing and painting. In this way, her body became both subject and instrument, and the figures became channels through which she transferred both body and psyche into the work.

At one point, Kahraman brought up the story of the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi and his meeting with Shams. As a young man, Rumi was seated by a river surrounded by books, reading in pursuit of knowledge, when Shams suddenly cast the books into the water. The gesture, devastating at first, became a revelation: knowledge cannot rest solely on intellect but must move beyond the written word. “It was this sense of moving past the purely textual that shaped the making of these works,” Kahraman reflects.

“Can I be intuitive-clairvoyant-even as the rational, patriarchal voice in my head demands proof?” Kahraman writes in her own essay accompanying the show, encapsulating the essence of these new works. “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.”

As the title “Ghost Fires” suggests, the artist takes fire as her central motif—at once cathartic and destructive. These ghostly fires began appearing in her imagery more than a year ago, foreshadowing the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that later left her family without a livable home. The exhibition is anchored in Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, which Kahraman was determined to rescue from the ruins despite the chemical stench of toxins that made it difficult to breathe. Adnan once wrote of the sun, “Because the sun is dangerous, it can kill you—burn you. But the sun is also life,” a line Kahraman recalled vividly. Fire, in her hands, operates in much the same way: an archetypal presence embodying both life and death, regeneration and decay, part of the eternal cycle of matter and energy transforming endlessly into one another.

In Islamic cosmology, humans were created from clay and earth, angels from light and jinn from smokeless fire. Read against Kahraman’s new work, it becomes clear that these feminine presences are much more than alter egos despite their resemblance. They appear as jinn—feminine spirits, invisible and constantly transforming, beings of volatility and energy capable of both creation and destruction. Acting as guides or forces of chaos, they channel a relentless current of life that ensures renewal after the ashes. “I think they’re always marching—or at least I hope they are,” she reflects. “I really hope they’re always moving and changing, always in flux. I truly believe nothing is ever static anyway.”

This body of work was also inspired by a dystopian Kurdish folktale her great-aunt once told her, about a louse and a flea warming themselves by a bread oven on a cold night. When the louse’s thimble falls into the fire, the flea dives in to retrieve it, only to catch fire and explode. Grief spreads outward in a cascading chain: the louse pulls out her hair, the crow sheds its feathers, the palm tree drops its fronds, even the river dries up. The story ends with the mother figure at the oven, who, in her mourning, burns her womb. In this tale, the feminine body becomes both a vessel of grief and a site of regeneration, a reminder that loss and renewal are forever intertwined.

In New York, Kahraman’s work weaves together a similar narrative of cyclical forces—destruction, memory and rebirth. As she describes it, each composition unfolds as an act of “reworlding”: a process of remembering, reimagining and reclaiming.

At the same time, the figures in Kahraman’s new works all have empty eyes. This symbolic element first appeared about two years ago, when she was making work about the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. Her research was both personal and academic: a cousin in Sweden, who worked with unaccompanied Afghan minors, told her about the brutal tactics some used to avoid biometric tracking. Many arrived with the tips of their fingers sliced off, burned with acid or rubbed raw with sandpaper to erase their fingerprints. The story left her with a visceral, physical reaction that lingered. She learned that border authorities were also scanning irises, turning the body into a map of control. “That became my train of thought—this need to erase the traces on your body as a way of creating agency, or as a form of radical protest, even though it means erasing part of yourself. That’s how I came to the figures without irises. I wanted the figures to refuse that access, so that my audience wouldn’t get to enter through their gaze either.”

After our exchange, however, even these blank pupils appear as more than gestures of erasure: they become portals that look both inward and outward, openings to deeper dimensions—the inner eye of the psyche as well as mythic and spiritual realms that allow an escape from earthly grief. “I’ve been painting figures without irises for a while, but at some point it shifted inward,” she explains. At first, they arose from anger and indignation, tied to questions of what is visible and what is concealed. Over time, though, they began to suggest something else. “It’s more about this place of protection, a turning inward, a space of mystery. Now that’s how it reads to me, as existing in the realms of the unseen.”

Ultimately, this exhibition shows Kahraman embracing the transformative power of her spontaneous mythopoiesis through art. Like myths and folktales, her densely symbolic works act as vessels of ancestral memory, turning her practice into a storytelling ritual that links individual pain to collective experience. As Michael Meade writes, myths and archetypes do not explain grief so much as create a vessel for it—a kind of medicine for times of rupture and destruction such as those we face today, and that Kahraman has personally endured. Coded with archetypal struggles that mirror humanity’s deepest ordeals—abandonment, betrayal, exile, death, rebirth—her work, like that Kurdish folktale or any ancient myth, ultimately offers a symbolic path through trauma, a rhythm that situates even the most devastating experiences within the wider arc of human and cosmic story.

Hayv Kahraman’s “Ghost Fires” is at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York through October 25.

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