Phantoms of the Unfinished: Liturgy, Disappearance, and the Ethics of Facelessness in the Work of Hayv Kahraman.
Written by Guzal Koshbahteeva
From afar, Hayv Kahraman's work presumes order: a silent crowd of women, moving jointly. But, in a close-up, perception begins to shift. The faces start to slip, repetition suddenly carries weight, and visual sameness reveals a deeper layer: fracture. The figures are multiplied selves or visual echoes, touched by melancholy. The closer we approach, the less we understand. One face for all, and something is missing in each.
For images of this work, see Hayv Kahraman’s The Audience (2018) on The Third Line Gallery site
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Although biography is often treated as cliché in art criticism, in Kahraman's case, it becomes indispensable. Hayv Kahraman was born in Iraq in 1981. She fled Baghdad at eleven with her family, settling in Sweden. Displacement at a young age became a significant part of her practice. Experiences of war, exile, and transformation live through her art and continue to shape its meaning (The Third Line, n.d.).
Educated in graphic design at the Accademia di Arte e Design di Firenze in Italy, Kahraman now lives and works in Los Angeles. She works across painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. These media allow her to explore recurring themes of exile, fragmentation, and memory (The Third Line, n.d.). Kahraman’s paintings frequently feature anonymous, repeated female figures, with faces rendered in delicate, painterly precision. Her visual language is both delicate and severe, carrying the weight of fractured identity and intergenerational trauma.
What follows is an examination of the visual, psychological, and philosophical aspects of Hayv Kahraman's work. This is not an interpretation for its own sake but an attempt to understand what these paintings withhold and why.
Analysis:
What draws immediate attention in the work is what stares back: A single body, an identical face repeated, and silence. It is not a passive encounter; rather, an intrusion where the viewer steps into a ritual that has long since begun. If, as Lacan writes, the gaze is a form of intrusion, then the refusal to meet it becomes an act of resistance. Hayv Kahraman's figures do not share themselves, and their seeming blankness is nothing but a position in which they refuse to be made visible on anyone else's terms.
Before all else, Hayv Kahraman's paintings are not portraits, though they masquerade as such. They are symbolic reliquaries of psychic trauma disguised in decorative form. The repeated face is mask-like, insistently uniform, and embodies a paradox. But from where does this repetition emerge? When a face appears this often, does it reveal more or disappear further into itself?
Kahraman's work encompasses a range of visual traditions, such as Islamic ornamentalism, the minimalism of Japanese painting, and the compositional discipline of Renaissance figuration. However, her precision and passivity in depicting identical faces intrigue and demand further investigation.
It begins in the tradition of Islamic art, where depicting the repetition of identical faces is symbolic. An individualized depiction is unfavorable, mainly because it opposes idolatry and centers on the divine. Uniformity carries a profound meaning; it is infinite: not a single human, but humanity; not one moment, but eternity (Marks, 2010). Repetition this way turns into a form of devotion. Looking at Kahraman's work, the repetition of faces continues a tradition rooted in abstraction and infinity, but it shifts in tone and purpose. In Kahraman's hands, it carries the weight of memory and loss.
But if traditional Islamic repetition moves onward, Kahraman's repetition turns inward. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes, "To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent" (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 1). For Deleuze, repetition is not the return of the identical, but the emergence of difference via this recurrence. This way, Kahraman, who paints her faces or rather facelessness, avoids resemblance and strives toward something that escapes fixed identity. Furthermore, faces return but never resolve.
Hayv Kahraman's paintings resist simple categories. They do not reveal the divine or the self. They resemble phantoms. Although Kahraman could recognize her figures, she could not fully know. Moreover, each face she paints resembles a visual mantra, via which she amplifies/distances pain. In this space between knowing and losing, Kahraman sustains the paradox at the heart of exile. It is here that Kahraman herself speaks of the act of painting as a response to trauma, offering insight into how repetition and ritual operate in her work.
In Kahraman's words, healing is not a goal but a presence. Reflecting on her early paintings, she describes them as unconscious responses to personal and political trauma. "You carry that abuse silently in your body," she recalls, "but it came out in the work… I could not see it at the time. I had some people come up to me and say, 'Are you okay?'" Painting became the language through which she processed memory, even before she fully understood it herself. "Painting is the way that I speak," she continues. "This whole body of work started out to somehow, maybe naively, find some sort of utopian way to reach healing. But as I started making them, I started realizing it's not about the endpoint… it's really about the process… being present in these entanglements and being okay with that pain" (Greenberger, 2021). Her description underscores that healing is an ongoing condition. Yet the nature of this healing is not closure or cure. It more closely resembles a ritual: a repeated act of putting the self to sleep, of muting its demands yet without entirely silencing them. Healing, in this case, is a way of living with what remains unsettled instead of restoration. This unsettledness inevitably returns to questions of selfhood.
There is a sense that Kahraman is not painting women. She is painting the self she is trying to un-become and, perhaps, the fragment of self she is attempting to retrieve. Returning to the question asked earlier, whether repetition leads these faces further into disappearance, the answer is more complicated than certainty allows. Repetition does not recover what was lost. It does not erase it either. It offers a way of keeping absence visible, refusing to let it disappear. Out of this tension, the question of identity: What becomes of self when it grows alongside something it cannot recover?
Kahraman’s paintings are not portraits in a conventional sense. There is a weight that they carry, of someone searching for a piece of the self that was taken away too early, or even more, perhaps never allowed to form completely. Identity is a complex structure; Julia Kristeva, a philosopher and literary critic, says, "Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself" (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1). Furthermore, she explains that exile fractures more than geography; it also fractures the sense of coherence of the self. Foreignness becomes a condition of the mind, body, and memory. Now, seeing through this perspective, Kahraman's repeated figures are not an act of self-recovery or self-erasure; it is the efforts to survive the distance between these two and an attempt to preserve something alive in the space where belonging used to exist.
Edward Said and his reflections on exile deepen this understanding of foreignness by framing it as a haunting condition rather than a geographic loss. In his Reflections on Exile (2000), he writes, "Exile is predicated on the existence of a memory, a vision of a lost home that haunts the exile's life" (Said, 2000). The exile does not merely lose a place; they carry the memory of belonging that no longer fits into any present reality. He describes exile as "life led outside habitual order... nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal" (Said, 2000). Across much of the Middle East, histories of colonialism, conflict, and forced migration have rendered exile a generational condition. Kahraman's repeated figures emerge from within this fractured existence.
Fractured and fragmented are the keywords to the experience that Kahraman captures. Her paintings attempt to preserve the space between self-seeking and self-erasure; it is here that she tries to save what is left of belonging. Belonging is central: it is both what she tries to save and what she feels slipping away. However, when she tries to preserve it, she simultaneously fragments her identity, and instead of creating actual centrality, she composes the phantom of it. As Deleuze reminds us, her repeated faces are the emergence of difference within resemblance. This mutual face echoes a collective wound, yet within every repetition, each figure remains unique to the singular pain it carries within.
Closing thoughts:
I believe no interpretation can fully contain works of art. They endure, however careful, one can explore them. It is, in the end, a mystery. A saying from the Arab world comes to mind: the poem's meaning remains hidden in the poet's heart.
This piece started as an article and turned into an essay. The works of Hayv Kahraman contain difficulty in them; what cannot be said kept me searching for more. I first encountered her paintings online about eight months ago, and her pieces stayed in the back of my mind quietly until the urgency to respond could no longer be ignored.
I cannot pretend to know the full weight of exile. But I have met those who taught me about its complexity, its terrible intimacy. Edward Said wrote: "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience". Like the meaning kept in the poet's heart, exile carries something nameless, a grief without language. Hayv Kahraman does not force her audience to become a part of her work; it is an act of witnessing. Each repetition of the face traces a generational ritual, vicious, one marked by force.
When Edward Said writes that the loss is permanent, I cannot disagree.
References:
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
Greenberger, A. (2021, October 4). Hayv Kahraman’s provocative new paintings express trauma and healing. Artsy. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-hayv-kahramans-provocative-new-paintings-express-trauma-healing
Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press.
Marks, L. U. (2010). Enfoldment and infinity: An Islamic genealogy of new media art. MIT Press.
Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on exile and other essays. Harvard University Press.
Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on exile. Granta. Retrieved from https://granta.com/reflections-on-exile/
The Third Line. (n.d.). Hayv Kahraman.
