The Mosaic Rooms

“The protagonists of these paintings, on view at London’s Mosaic Rooms in Kahraman’s exhibition Gut Feelings, are trapped in a limbo state. You can read that through a personal history. Kahraman was born in Baghdad in 1981. A decade later, during the Gulf war, her family fled the country as part of the mass Kurdish exodus, travelling under false passports through Jordan, Ethiopia, Yemen and Germany before settling in Sweden.

That experience of forced dislocation never went away — the pain present in migrant communities is the leitmotif that snakes across Kahraman’s figures, created out of dense whirls of black, mauve and ochre across earthy Belgian linen.”

Read the full review here.