The Brooklyn Rail

Hayv Kahraman is on fire. Ghost Fires, Kahraman’s latest show, is a searing meditation upon the lasting deprivations of war and the elemental forces of natural disaster. Kahraman knows a thing or two about the many guises violence and dislocation wear. When she was eleven, her family fled the febrile abyss of America’s occupation of Iraq. Earlier this year, Kahraman lost her home amid the wildfires which incinerated swathes of Southern California. In many ways, then, Ghost Fires is both a response to the loss of her home and a continuation of a practice which cuts deep.

In several works, among them The Sun and the Hair and the Wind (all works 2025), Kahraman paints her female subjects—an interlocked circle of women viewed from above, a singular braid of hair tying them together—atop marbleized sheets of woven flax. The fibrous nature of the flax, its coarse, frayed edges, give the work a desiccated, charred quality. This sense is heightened by the painting’s marbled background, a wash of sooty black ripples and whorls dotted with flecks and splotches of sanguineous red. Marbling has been an element of Kahraman’s visual language for several years. In Ghost Fires, however, the carbonous marbling conjures a charged atmosphere. Smoke and flame, ash and ember—this is its language.

Women—or more appropriately, the same woman with jet-black hair, heavy brow, rose red lips—are a constant subject in Kahraman’s body of work. They sometimes appear as a solitary figure, as in the titular Ghost Fires, or as multiples of each other, as with Ghost Fires Through Eyes. More recently, Kahraman has taken to portraying her subjects’ eyes without irises or pupils. Myth and history, of course, are filled with blind seers—Sophocles’s Tiresias, John Milton’s Samson—the lack of sight a metaphor for prophetic powers. Revelation is never just a matter of seeing with your own eyes. What is blind faith, after all? The solitary white-eyed women of Invocation—hands outstretched, tendrils of plaited white smoke arising from them—and Rain Bird—crouched low, the same braided coils of smoke handled like rope—lend the imagery in Ghost Fires a sibylline air. Kahraman writes in a statement accompanying the exhibition that she began working on the series well before the fires destroyed her home, rhetorically asking “Can I be intuitive…?” Hybrid symbolism and mythologies are woven together throughout Ghost Fires, prophetic sight, references to rituals and invocations, establishing a self-fashioned lore unique to Kahraman, one which spans cultures, centuries, genealogies. Whether or not Kahraman is clairvoyant is beside the point: her vision is an altogether unique form of seeing, eclipsing boundaries and identity, asserting a far more radical act of self-becoming.

Fire symbolizes many things to many cultures and is often ascribed a dualistic nature: creator and destroyer, source of affliction and means for absolution. Kahraman refers to jinns and Anqas, mythical figures common to Persian and Arab lore, but with origins stretching to the dawn of Mesopotamia civilization. Both jinn—a shape-shifting wish granter—and Anqa—a female bird, much like a phoenix, born anew from its own immolation—share fire as agent of becoming and destruction. Among the most arresting of Kahraman’s images is Anqa', a large-scale painting which replaces the eponymous mythical bird for the artist’s ubiquitous women. Wearing a crown of red and black braids, a white-eyed woman sits in a marbled cloud, legs spread wide, her palms inset with eyes at their center, facing outward and covering her genitals, while below, the upturned legs of three women stand like tentacles, their buttocks exposed. Hayv Kahraman’s infernal Anqa', like all the images in Ghost Fires, has rage and spectacle in spades. It also gestures toward a far more sublime truth. Destruction’s finality is certain only when hope’s vision is clouded by despair.