Piri' Miri Muli'

22 January 2025

Fire, 2025

Painter and Altadena resident Hayv Kahraman has set up a GoFundMe for her relocation. “Fortunately, Hayv and her family made it out and their home remains standing BUT it will be UNINHABITABLE for the next year as it goes through the necessary steps to get decontaminated, which means they are homeless and uncertain at this time.

“Nearly everything they had in the house will have to be removed because of smoke damage and they will be moving into a temporary apartment in the coming weeks, hopefully.”

Kahraman grew up in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war and the Persian Gulf War: "I would look out my bedroom window and see a rain of air-raid bombs. They looked like fireworks. (The air-raid sirens) are so loud and when they happen, you know that you might actually die any minute. It shakes you to the core." Her family attempted to leave for Iran when she was eleven and was struck in traffic for eleven days before finding the border closed, hiring a smuggler the following year to get to Sweden and then Florence where she copied Fra Angelico and Giotto. “People talk about (the Altadena fire) looking like a war zone and they are right. I can tell you that it does. The loss is so vast and encompassing. The rubble. The air. The color of the sky. I felt transported to that time. I had begun building a life here. A home where I was slowly shedding my survivor mode that I’ve carried in my body since the Iraq war.”

“I am concerned with the multitude not the self," she said in a 2016 interview. "This is not only my story. It can be the story of more than 5 million people within the Iraqi diaspora or any diaspora.” Kahraman was a signatory to the October 19, 2023 ArtForum letter supporting “Palestinian liberation.. an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.. that the institutional silence around the ongoing humanitarian crisis that 2.3 million Palestinians are facing in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip be broken immediately” which led to the firing of its Editor-in-Chief David Velasco.

Recent works are up at Seattle's Frye Museum til February 2nd.