Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to collaborate with the gallery on Hayv Kahraman’s third solo exhibition. Libationthe exhibition will last until March 21, 2026. This is Kahraman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since the 2025 Altadena Eaton fire displaced people, and the artist’s latest work responds to pressing questions raised by the past year’s catastrophic events: What will people do when the world collapses? These works seek to understand her experience of the fire and its lasting consequences, while continuing her exploration of the poetics of loss, displacement, and migration. Kahraman sees these works as offerings, memorials to a burning world. The paintings are evident not only in their dreamlike depictions of bodies in action, but also in the materiality of their surfaces, which incorporate handmade linen and marbling techniques to evoke divination, ritual and magic.
The female figures in Kahraman’s paintings engage in mysterious and ritualistic behaviors—sewing strands of tears to reveal portals, rhythmically twirling and swaying their long hair in a circular dance. These figures are like talismans that can summon relief and protection from calamities and calamities. One of the talismans that appears in several of the paintings is a Rubik’s Cube, drawn according to the instructions in one of the earliest books on Sufi magic written by the Sufi master al-Būnī. Khahraman has an Arabic inscription buried in the painting’s swirling surface that refers to a mysterious phoenix bird known as the “phoenix.” Ankhliving on the edge of the world, reborn from the ashes. Another recurring concept explored in the work is barzakhan Arabic word denoting the liminal space between the physical and spiritual worlds. kahraman metaphor barzakh A view of her home in Altadena, located in a transitional zone known as the wasteland-urban interface. This interstitial realm is a space of danger and possibility at the same time – it is both a threshold to the powerful forces of the natural world and an ecotone of rich resources and astonishing biodiversity.
Kahraman’s involvement with Sufism can be traced to her mother’s ancestral lands from the Kurdish mountains of present-day Iraq, where she was displaced during the first Gulf War. The mysticism of Sufi thought offered her a refuge from disillusionment and a path to regaining the ancestral knowledge she had been taught to distrust. Kahraman’s latest work engages imagination and metaphysics as antidotes to ecological disaster and devastating loss. The alchemical quality of these paintings highlights Kahraman’s ability to give substance to the unseen, thus achieving a fusion of matter and spirit.
Kahraman further described the new work:
As I was painting, this question kept coming up: a year after our world was engulfed in flames, what can I offer? charm. I felt the need to dig deeper, to reclaim the realm of imagination, to reawaken wonder as a way of existence. I try to infuse my work with talismans and spells to make the invisible visible.
I don’t provide any answers. There is only one invitation. Inviting you to dwell on the edge where the earth trembles, certainties loosen, and the world is still changing. Here, imagination has no place, and vision changes: the sight relaxes, no longer clinging to knowledge, but opens, enters, and travels through imagination. Here, forms dissolve and recombine, light weaves new patterns, new possibilities. Time is passing, invisible things are stirring, and new worlds are quietly beginning to appear.
