Hayv Kahraman: Ghost Fires @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - With a text by the artist

Hayv Kahraman: Ghost Fires

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

September 11 – October 25, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Ghost Fires, an exhibition of new work by Hayv Kahraman, the artist's fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Informed by Kahraman's longstanding exploration of displacement, this new body of work is also a response to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and their direct effect on Hayv Kahraman and her family. In a text written specifically for the exhibition and included here in full, Hayv Kahraman reflects on the ongoing process of understanding these events andcontinuing to find meaning in the world around her:

Hayv Kahraman –

The chemical stench of the toxins left behind by the fire in my home in Altadena made it hard to breathe, but I was determined to find what I had left behind before fleeing: Etel Adnan's book, The Arab Apocalypse. Adnan once said of the sun, "Because the sun is dangerous it can kill you — burn you. But the sun is also life."

Don't look up at the sun, we are told. Our irises burned, scraped abraded-like the migrants burning their fingerprints to evade border police. Burning the traces on your fingers to circumvent erasure. Edouard Glissant comes to mind as I think of burning irises seizing the right to be illegible. The paradox is damning. This is a story that mingles in the interstices of decay and fecundity. In the unseen realms of jinn and spirit. In the Anqa; an illusory female bird who induces renewal andresurrection by burning herself in a nest of palm fronds.

One of the many erasures my body has had to contend with after becoming a refugee in the west is of an embodied connection to sentient and non sentient kin. To be connected with the ecologies I touch and to whom I am touched by. To be attuned to what Gloria Anzaldúa named as spirit and what I think of as jinn. Did the jinn originate from the flames of the sundescending on the planet to live unseen with us humans?

Depression after the fires has made my dissociation palpable and infuriating. I felt severed from my body. You stole my connection to my ancestors. To my ghosts and jinns anddreams. To my place of birth and the cosmologies it houses. To my wind. How do you paint the wind? I've been obsessing about this for many years. Wind is movement, change and life. Wind is also fire. If change is God, like Octavia Butler says, then wind is also God. To celebrate the birth of each year, we dance around fires in west Asia. My ancestors worshiped fire.

Can I be intuitive-clairvoyant-even as the rational, patriarchal voice in my head demands proof? How can I birth and be in ceremony with my painting without justifying its existence in this place? Like an asylum seeker justifying her pain to the immigration officer.

My own ghost fires began showing up in my paintings months before the fires in Los Angeles. "Nature is at war with itself," Adnan says. The womb is burning like in the story I was told as a child in West Asia. An eschatological tale of an entangled, more-than-human, cascading event ignited when a small 'pest' — the flea-slips into a tannour oven and explodes. The death of the flea affects all other sentient beings on the planet. Ending apocalyptically with the mother, sitting on ahot saj, burning her womb.

I am reminded of what my people say: we have no friends but the mountains. This is why I chose this house, because of its proximity to the mountains — that are now barren and charred. Today is the shadow of tomorrow. War refugee, climate refugee. Now what? How can I re-member my connection to this land? Can the ghost fires be generative? The womb is furiously burning like the volcano in Hawaii and it will smolder even once the fires are extinguished. Just like the endless burn pits left in Iraq releasing toxins that our windsbring to us. This is what war does. It silently haunts.

A few weeks after the fires, I returned to my house. The cacti in the yard had bloomed wildly. I had never seen them this healthy and yet, across the street, everything was ash. It became glaringly obvious to me then that this devastation also brought life, perhaps even the emergence of another world. Parallel to this nascent world are the ghost fires that haunt me as I replay the few memories my mind has chosen to keep of the war, in my body, today, in LA. They haunt me so that I re-member. For how can I dream of an emergent world if I close my eyes to the ghosts around me?

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY

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General Conditions @ Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

Through November 29, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents GENERAL CONDITIONS at The School at Kinderhook, NY. Bringing together work by over two dozen artists working across a wide range of media and at scales both intimate and grand, the exhibition offers a sustained reflection on the social and political climate of our time by considering how we respond—individually and collectively—when many of the most basic components of public life can no longer be taken for granted.

Featured artists include: El Anatsui, Emanoel Araújo, Shimon Attie, Shannon Bool, Diedrick Brackens, Yoan Capote, Geoffrey Chadsey, Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu, Gehard Demetz, Pierre Dorion, Donyel Ivy-Royal, Hayv Kahraman, Jesse Krimes, Deborah Luster, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Jackie Nickerson, Gordon Parks, Mary Ann Peters, Kenny Rivero, Rose B. Simpson, Paul Anthony Smith, Becky Suss, Alina Tenser, Carlos Vega, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Deb Willis, Jaclyn Wright, and Elizabeth Zvonar.

As artist Alina Tenser notes, the idea of ‘general conditions’ “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague. In the world of construction, the term holds power precisely because of its evasiveness, allowing those in control to shift goalposts in ways that serve their interests. Its ambiguity makes it nearly impossible for the opposing or disadvantaged side to challenge, negotiate or fully grasp the terms at play. This dynamic eerily mirrors the structural changes we’re witnessing in federal policy, where language and bureaucracy are weaponized to obscure, justify and enable horrific systemic shifts. In both cases, the lack of clear definition breeds a sense of injustice and impending doom, leaving those affected with no firm ground on which to push back.” With social stability seeming to be an ideal of the past and civic norms disappearing by the day, the artists in this exhibition provide us with a bevy of new strategies for thinking about and confronting the crisis of ‘general conditions’ felt by us all.

While each of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS stands as vivid expressions and bold aesthetic statements in their own regard, many cohere around recurring themes. For example, Richard Mosse’s Heat Map photographs examine the control and exploitation of refugees and migrants as they attempt to move safely across borders. Using a military-grade telephoto camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, across great distances, Richard Mosse documented refugee camps and staging sites, seeing them as landscapes of human displacement where millions struggle for survival.

Displacement is a theme that Hayv Kahraman also considers in her multimedia works on paper, linen and flax fiber. Her pieces regularly show fragmented or disembodied pairs of eyes set within spacious compositions or, in others, hanging from the branches of trees that remain defiant within their fragile landscapes. For Hayv Kahraman, the disembodiment that her works figurally express serves as a metaphor for the psyche of refugees forced to flee their homes. Kahraman understands this experience personally, having first fled her native country of Iraq and again, more recently, as a result of having to evacuate her home and studio due to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.

With Utah’s West Desert as both setting and subject, Jaclyn Wright combines original and archival photographs with regional maps and elements of performance to show the impact of late capitalism and settler colonization on the landscapes of the Western United States. Her photographs are composites of historical and contemporary imagery that investigate the codification of the natural world by state officials and business interests alike. Working with mediums and techniques such as, tapestry, embroidery and photograms, Shannon Bool regularly explores how hierarchy is embedded into historical narratives and their visual expressions. In his large-scale and often allegorical paintings that look to the histories of religion and the cosmos alike, Carlos Vega likewise explores the hidden structures of social life and the meanings embedded within them.

Many of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS express moments of personal defiance and solidarity against the systems of oppression that, by keeping people in positions of uncertainty and even desperation, try to maintain a status quo of injustice and inequity. Gordon Parks’ photographs of Black communities in a still-segregated South show individuals navigating politically fraught circumstances with resolution and grace. The multi-directional colored wooden planes that Emanoel Araújo arranges in his sculpture compositions take a rigid and geometric frame as their background before transcending it through their formal expressivity. Working at a comparatively monumental scale, Rose B. Simpson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures of worldly yet ethereal figures, just recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, are specific expressions of the artist’s ancestry and cultural heritage that also uphold the value of the human spirit.

What the variety and complexity of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS demonstrates is that no single approach for understanding the present historical conjuncture will do. Instead, these artists provide multiple strategies that we can use to better interpret, represent and hopefully seize control of the conditions around us.

THE SCHOOL / JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY

jackshainman.com

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY, May 17 - November 29, 2025