Hayv Kahraman at Pilar Corrias
There are so many words said, so many reports released, stating the mental and emotional decline of people around the world. Barely a day goes by without mention of the loneliness epidemic, stratospheric demand in mental healthcare for people of all ages, and the list goes on. The solutions are all offensively simple: yes, of course going for a walk can help clear the mind, but if the source of your pain persists when you return home, how can you move forward? And what to say of the solution to emotional distress? Under neoliberal conditions,we must activate our status as a consumer and pay for therapy, of course! If you opt out of paid therapeutic models and pharmaceutical fixes, you are considered to indeed be your own worst enemy, at which point, sympathy has run out.
Expressing sadness of all kinds is strictly forbidden, and still profoundly taboo, regardless of how some may extol the virtues of destigmatising mental health concerns. This is largely a myth; it must be, when we are still living under the conditions (abuse of all kinds, housing precarity, racism, misogyny, domestic violence) that produce mental health breakdowns and serious conditions. Furthermore, there is also an unspoken hierarchy of which kinds of sadness are socially acceptable, something like a scale between low-level anxiety and schizophrenia. We have each experienced our own shame around emotions, and this social conditioning often relates to how much it affects either our ability to be a good worker, or how much social stigma might result from expressing ourselves.
Installation view: Hayv Kahraman, What cannot be said will be wept, 5 June - 29 August 2026. Pilar Corrias, London. Image courtesy of the gallery.
Artist Hayv Kahraman uses personal experience to create paintings that are steeped in a unique form of sadness. It is a rare gift to be able to communicate such heavy grief through the medium of painting, but the motifs and repetition of this latest body of work, ‘What cannot be said will be wept’ produce an understanding of the artist’s message. Kahraman has shared that her experience as a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee, followed by the loss of her home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires has shaped this work, and receiving this knowledge feels sacred. As a viewer, we are not owed this contextual information, but being granted it allows for a certain dialogue between artist and viewer that doesn’t require an excess of exposure on her part.
The many works in the exhibition are so clearly made as one body of work that it is a seamless, engaging experience to navigate the ground floor and basement spaces. The motif of the ocean is prevalent in every painting, alongside a domineering navy painted on the gallery walls. Paint on the walls forms something of a conversation with the paint on the canvases, and the oceanic palette situates the viewer in the realm of the natural world. At a time where the sea and the boats that traverse it are front of centre in narratives around refugee journeys and migration, it is a powerful backdrop to paintings that are at once beautiful and evocative.
Speaking of this balance, the figures in each painting are identical women, all of whom are somehow stunning, distractingly so given the depth of the subject matter we are contending with. In Kahraman’s accompanying text to the exhibition, she says that “modernity and coloniality has [sic.] imposed the illusion that I am an isolated being”, and this sense of isolation is impossible to ignore in the work once it has been highlighted. While the women in the paintings congregate and endure together, in and around the ocean, they do not seem to communicate with each other; their pain appears isolated, and only seemingly understood as a collective experience from the outside looking in. In practice, a shared, “entangled” struggle is easier to mobilise, but as Kahraman alludes to, if we believe our struggles and our pain to be individualised and isolated, it is so much harder to feel that there is a positive way out.
Hayv Kharaman, Four Figures Kneeling, 2026. Oil and acrylic on linen, 231.1cm x 180.3cm. Image courtesy of Pilar Corrias and the artist.
There is also a pervasive silence in the exhibition, as if the depicted women are in the room with us and quite literally suffering in silence. The artist is also concerned with the loss of environments and ancestral knowledge, and works such as ‘Four Figures Kneeling’ could be seen as the compounding of the experiences and pain of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. These identical women are all, as the title suggests, kneeling, but they are also clinging to each other, unnaturally on top of each other, each one closer to the ocean, with the woman at the bottom of the pile doing something of a yogic child’s pose, succumbing to the water. The identical nature of Kahraman’s figures are deeply symbolic in this emphasis on collective feeling and action: we are all one.
Beads of tears, streaming from the women, join the water of the ocean, in works such as ‘Figure Threading Tear Beads’, but the stoic expressions on each figure generate a certain withholding. While Kahraman is incredibly generous in both her writing and explanations of the life experiences which have helped formulate these paintings, her women show us that we can never fully understand an individual’s pain and melancholy. Empathy and listening to the Earth are the only way forward, resisting the pull of consumerism, compartmentalisation, and (neo-)colonialism wherever we can. Together.
