PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - Hayv Kahraman : What cannot be said will be wept - Juni 5 > September 5, 2026

📖 Legend:

Gallery Artist(s) Date Description Images Info Sponsor Press Office

PILAR CORRIAS

Exhibition venue: 51 Conduit Street London W1S 2YT

Location: LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Tel: Tel: +44 (0) 20 7323 7000 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7323 6400 | Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Opening Hours: Monday: Open by appointment only Tuesday–Friday: 10am–6pm Saturday: 11–6pm Sunday: Closed

Locations's CITY(COUNTRY) : LONDON (UNITED KINGDOM) (2)

📍 All location(s) address:

LONDON - 51 Conduit Street London W1S 2YT (UNITED KINGDOM)
LONDON - 2 Savile Row London W1S 3PA (UNITED KINGDOM)

Location(s) map

🎨 Artist:

Hayv Kahraman

Artist Abstract:
Hayv Kahraman (b. 1981) is a Kurdish-Iraqi painter whose work primarily deals with the body politics of migrant consciousness. Often blended with her personal history as a refugee to Europe and ultimately to the United States, she creates a unique visual language that reflects her nomadic background and challenges various notions of hegemonic control.

Kahraman’s current and recent solo exhibitions include: Look Me in the Eyes, Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2024); She has no name, Pilar Corrias, London, UK (2024); Look Me in the Eyes, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, San Francisco (2024); Hayv Kahraman: The Foreign in Us, Rice University Moody Center For The Arts, Houston (2024); Gut Feelings, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Touch of Otherness, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2022); Not Quite Human: Second Iteration, Pilar Corrias, London (2020); Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design, Honolulu, HI (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Sussex, UK (2019); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2018); and Contemporary Art Museum St, Louis, St. Louis, MO (2017).

Other recent group exhibitions include: The inescapable interweaving of all lives, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2023); Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond, LACMA, Los Angeles (2023); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2022); Our whole, unruly selves, San José Museum of Art, San José (2021); Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, British Museum, London (2021); Blurred Bodies, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2021); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2021); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2019); ICA Boston (2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019). Kahraman’s work is in several important international collections including the British Museum, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California, US; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), California, US; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, US; The Rubell Family Collection, Florida, US; The Barjeel Art Foundation Sharjah, UAE; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha, Qatar; Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, US; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, US; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, US.

Hayv Kahraman lives and works in Los Angeles.

📅 Dates:

Juni 5 - September 5, 2026

🖼️ Images:

Hayv Kahraman, Four figures kneeling, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.

📝 Exhibition Description:

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present What cannot be said will be wept, an exhibition of new paintings by Hayv Kahraman. The exhibition draws on Kahraman’s personal history as a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee and the loss of her home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires to consider the effects of systems that separate people from land, ancestry, ecology and embodied forms of knowledge.

The artist's text, written to accompany the exhibition, is included in full at the link below:

One of the deepest spells modernity has cast upon me is that of separation. Yes, I was extracted from my land through systemic violence, occupation and domination, this is one form of rupture. But there is another, more insidious severing I am only now beginning to name: a disconnection from my environment, from the natural world, from the human and more-than-human and from a kind of knowing behind knowing.

Modernity and coloniality has imposed the illusion that I am an isolated being, that the earth is not on my side. It has thinned my capacity for wonder, eroded my ability to dream within both the known and unknown worlds. It has distanced me from my indigenous ontologies that understand existence as entangled, relational and inseparable. In its wake, it has inscribed a betrayal into my body, carried consciously or not, shaping how I meet the ecologies around me, how I trust, how I relate. These works enact a remembering with the natural world, where entangled relationality is slowly taking shape.

– Hayv Kahraman