The Pilar Corrias Gallery in London is presenting a new series of paintings by the Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman. Titled What cannot be said will be wept (‘What cannot be said will be wept over’), the exhibition brings together around twenty new works, made in oil and acrylic on linen, which extend the artist’s reflection on exile, the body and memory.
Born in 1981, Hayv Kahraman grew up between Iraq, Sweden, and the United States, where she now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has always been permeated by the experience of displacement and what she calls the "politics of the body" of migrant consciousness. This new series, however, is rooted in a more recent and personal event: the loss of her home in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles in 2025.
In the text accompanying the exhibition, the artist explains that this loss echoed an older wound: the violent uprooting from her homeland. But she also describes a second form of rupture: the break with the natural world that Western modernity has supposedly erased. Kahraman speaks of a feeling of separation imposed by coloniality.
Hayv Kahraman, Four Figures Kneeling, 2026 Oil and acrylic on linen, 231.1 x 180.3 cm.
Faced with a world she describes as "on fire," the artist says she turns to water: seas, rivers, tears. The aquatic motif literally permeates the exhibited canvases: the titles of the works, Oceans and Hair , Eyes in Waters , Ancestral Tides , or Ocean Lines , depict female bodies swimming and diving.
The technique itself reflects this vocabulary: Kahraman incorporates water marbling into her paintings, a process that involves immersing the canvas to create shifting patterns. This gesture, which she describes as ritualistic, becomes a way of allowing chance and water to play a role in the composition.
A recurring motif runs through several canvases: that of "tear beads , " a string of drops that the painted figures hold, pull, or become entangled in. It appears in works such as Choke and Tear Beads , Push Pull Tear Beads , Figure Threading Tear Beads , and Entangled in Tear Beads . These beads encapsulate the artist's idea: personal grief as part of a larger sorrow, that of the planet itself in the face of ecological disruption.
Hayv Kahraman, Three Figures in Spiral, 2026 Oil and acrylic on linen, 198.1 x 198.1 cm.
Some compositions, such as Three Figures in Spiral or Four Figures Kneeling , feature several almost identical female bodies, a long-standing signature of Kahraman's work.
Alongside these large formats, a series of small canvases (25 to 40 cm): Descent in mountains , Figure on an ocean hill , Triangle tears , Squatting figure and tears, offers more intimate variations on the same obsessions: the mountain, the ocean, the isolated figure facing a horizon.
What cannot be said will be wept
Pilar Corrias Gallery.
51 Conduit Street, London.
Until August 29, 2026.
