Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou explores the solace of Hayv Kahraman’s weeping women.
When I step into Pilar Corrias to see the work of Hayv Kahraman, London is in the intense throes of another heatwave. Outside, the pavement shimmers under the extreme light of the sun, hot to the touch and baked as if straight from a kiln. Inside, the coolness of the gallery space is a solace to the senses; airy yet bright, the canvases creating a calm at odds with the shrieking sights and sounds of nearby Regent Street. Sweat-stained and still perspiring, I try to compose myself in these elegant and cool in-more-than-one-way surrounds, self-consciously smoothing down my dress and trying not to fidget with my increasingly frizzing hair. Sticky and flushed though I am, Kahraman’s work is all mine, an oasis to the desert-like street, a relief in the midst of the harsh heat beyond the double-glazed doors.
Relief is an ostensibly ironic noun to apply to Kahraman’s latest suite of paintings. Featuring her beautiful and beautifully symbolic female-encoded figures in harmonious tableaux, bending and twisting, twirling and arching their bodies into another taut visual vocabulary, another corporeal vista, Kahraman’s works centre women weeping and mourning in liquid pools all of their own making. Relief, therefore, may be an odd term to associate with What cannot be said will be wept, an exhibition where the body is submerged and saturated in the excess of its own emotion, in the inconsolable depths of its own woes. But this, I think is what it is to cry, and this, in part, is what Kahraman has carefully and candidly granted viewers in the midst of a burning – ecological – crisis. Wet on dry, cool in hot, water at the edge of fire; Kahraman tips her women and viewers into the very soluble state and site they need in order to express the pain and hurt at the prospect of losing both. Relief in the “strands, beads, salt tears, drops, oceans”, as Kahraman describes it in her accompanying essay to the show, pours from the prophetic eyes of her female forms from within their frameless canvases, easing the anxiety and stress and fear many of us feel at this boiling point in time.
Derived from the Old French relever and Latin relevare, which translate as “to raise up, relieve,” and “raise again, alleviate”, relief can be the promise of succour in the presence of distress, release in the face of pressure or stress. Kahraman’s paintings, however, do not offer so easy a reprieve. We are not witnesses to a complete resurrection or resolution; the “raising” or alleviation afforded by the work is not to be found in the displayed depth of feeling, the permission to grieve, the admittance, even, of despair, when encountering ecological, environmental, and, therefore, personal loss. The relief is encountered when plunged into all three. Creating these works after losing her home to the LA wildfires, Kahraman’s watery worlds continue a long artistic legacy of existing in, sitting with – or in this case swimming amongst – the trouble. Exhibitions like Gut Feelings (2022, Mosaic Rooms) and She Has No Name (2024, Pilar Corrias), both hosted in the UK, have situated the human body – specifically the racialised, sexualised and classed form – in the midst of trouble, externalising and staging psychic and physiological trauma on and in and through the compelling corporeal female chorus. That her own form has been a blueprint, at times, for these painted battling bodies not only reemphasises her commitment to portraying individuals or groups subject to colonial and socio-political oppression, economic and ecological strain, but also reinstates her own personal and embodied connection to these stories, lives and the strife they at once endure and resist. Like the knotty intestinal cords in Gut Feelings, the upward creeping mourning flower in She has no name or the ropes of wraith-like hair in What cannot be said will be wept, Kahraman binds her own experiences into the bodily narratives of her figures, tying them ever closer to struggles past the canvas.
Three Figures in Spiral (2026) dramatize this entwinement of the personal and the political, the physical and the psychological. Like another kind of torture from Dante’s inferno, the female figures unceasingly rotate, spinning in a perpetual rondel of hair and flesh, tears and cloth, against a forsaken and barren backdrop. Grief is no longer relief here but emotional desolation and subsequent environmental devastation; an unrelenting release paradoxically without peace. Lament is one long unbroken wail in a vale virtually empty of tears. As is so true to Kahraman’s frieze of figures, there is a communality amongst the women, a form of fellowship, synchronicity and synonymity in suffering even when expressing or encountering extreme pain. Each holds on to a tightly wound coil of hair from the other, legs folded under their own bodies, hips compressed against torsos and into chests, faces fatally fixed into the crux of this contorted cycle of crying, while their arms skirt the circumference of it all. Are the women “spiralling” out of control, as the saying goes? Or will the spiral of their felt world deliver them to a place of respite? A terminus of stillness in a whorl of hair, limbs and tears? Kahraman gives us no conclusive catharsis or easy resolve; spinning the trouble out (or concentrically in?), the relief only comes in the mutuality manifest in this winding web or (un?)-healthy helix of human feelings.
Four Figures Kneeling (2026) does grant relief compositionally and thematically, with a trail of translucent tears beaded vertically in its centre. Again, the women form a human chain – or a tower, in this instance – kneeling or crouched over the backs of former figures – and ancestors? Are they older iterations of one self? Or a similarly shaped and attired ensemble, literally feeling through and fishing in the mercurial slipstream for something long lost? That the tears look pearlescent against the blues and greys – another symbol leaning towards the proverbial, for it takes months, even years, for a grain of sand or a minute creature to turn into a pearl – hints at the near-nacreous beauty of suffering, the precious knowledge gained with and through pain. It also speaks to the process of “emotional tears” as one that centres and calms, comforts and clears us psychologically and neurobiologically.
Culturally, crying is often labelled as weakness, as feeble, as dramatic (and in all of that read female). It’s a process and response all too readily dismissed as the inside messily spilling outwards, breaking the sleek surfaces and mechanisms of suppression we’ve made for ourselves as modern subjects. Yet (“healthy”) crying has healing properties: it releases hormones like cortisol, which lowers stress levels and prompts part of the brain to release endorphins and oxytocin. Outwardly, the muscles relax, the heart rate lowers, breathing deepens and slows; inwardly, composure and clarity can return. There is an expelling of emotion and a nonverbal expression of it too – What cannot be said will be wept is the apt title of the exhibition after all. Kahraman’s women, sifting amongst rivulets of feeling, perhaps panning and gleaning for pearls of wisdom, know that there’s more than bodily relief and release to be found in the tearful threads that unite them. A whole neurological, as well as epistemological, reordering takes place in the silent choral communication of, as well as communing with, their tears.
Being emotive and readily having access to one’s emotions have been historically associated with the feminine. The age-old binary of women being associated with the heart, men with the head, the feminine with passion, the masculine with reason, still haunts gender roles, social and political structures, familial, domestic and romantic relations, and notions of how we perceive and express ourselves. Yet Kahraman’s adoption of tears, of communal acts of crying and grieving, subverts and queers this bind. Open affectivity and porous vulnerability are, in her works, a powerful collective release, a radical affirmation of the power of the feminine as a force of self- and communal-care, a shared sign and search towards ecological retrieval and, ultimately, an ultra-human response. Through tears, the women grieve the losses met out to the desecrated and scorched earth, giving it the very thing it requires: water. Through the ritual of crying, they return to the issue of care, again a feminine or queer virtue necessary not only to reconnect with our natural, more-than-human world, but to nurture and be of it.
There is also something anarchic about women of colour being captured in the full motions of, well, their emotions. Living at a time where humanity and dignity, sensitivity and sympathy are all-too-often denied to Black and brown indigenous individuals (the indifferent and biased reporting of the suffering of Palestinian and Sudanese peoples is but one obvious example which unfortunately affirms this), seeing Kahraman grant space to the admission and emission of feeling is radical. What is more, when whiteness has historically and is, to some extent, still afforded a level of sentimental potency and currency from which non-white communities and racialized groups are barred – I’m thinking of the cultural and social capital of white women and their tears, and how this imagery has been exploited in the context of war and colonialism, occupation and segregation, the institution of slavery and police brutality, politics and the arts – reinstating the image of brown female bodies expressing and crying and reinventing in their hurt new ways to be in and approach the brokenness of the world – well, that’s defiance, a resistance that boldly cries out and against any type of repression or suppression. Thus, in Kahraman’s paintings, women of colour are not only permitted to emote, but they are empowered and empowering to behold when they do so. Emotion in this context does not render them consumable objects or bodies upon which to project; neither do their tears redirect us to whiteness and any of its problematic saviorism or self-glorification. Rather, the women are not only oblivious to such projections and denigrations, but are entirely closed off from them, immersed in the wellsprings of their own feeling, flooding the canvases with their teary expressiveness, at once bathing and paddling, then diving in and presiding over, Goddess-like (see the mighty and Circean Choke and Tear Beads and Push Pull Tear Beads, both 2026), these ancient waters of time.
Eyes in Water (2026) brilliantly encapsulates the female figures’ relief – even delight – in crying. Some forms are half submerged in liquid, others rise up, like mythical ladies of the lake, their hands brandishing eyes and necklaces of beaded tears, spoils from the deep uncovered after plunging, headfirst, under the affective, refractive surface. Water, here, whether engulfing or pouring forth from the figures, becomes a source of memory, as well as grief; a conduit to temporalities past, present and future. As a continuation from paintings that formed She has no name (2024), however, those women who remain above the water have only the whites of their eyes visible (sans irises and pupils, or those distinctive features of specific subjectivities). Blindness is not the intention, a perception beyond yet intimately of this natural world and its visions is, nonetheless, the point. By denying us the ocular signage and idiosyncrasies of sight, the women see what we cannot; that is, they feel sight and see feelings outside of our sensory remit. Seer-like, their eyes opaque to us, but perfectly perspicacious to them, crying, perhaps, resets seeing and, therefore, being, in a whole new light. Sometimes, in order to see clearly, we, like Kahraman’s women, must shut our eyes to appearances around us in order to perceive, to let be, to set free, that which lies within.
Kahraman has generously spoken about the need for control over her work as a refugee and survivor of war and violence. This control – and protection – is there in her all-seeing yet seemingly sightless women looking at us, but not giving us their view. It is there in the permission to emote in stylised and stunning scenes, aggrandising the feeling and the fullness of the felt world in and across landscapes that are particular to them. And control is also there in the exquisite execution of her brushwork, the pearlescent tears and the acrobatic bodies operatically weeping and grieving and knowing in a unified ceremonious corporeal song. Yet, as she has also acknowledged, marbling, the technique used to envisage the water in these paintings specifically, has forced the artist to “relinquish control”, freeing her up when making the work and allowing her “body to lead…and go where the pigment wants…to go”. Freedom and relinquishment, boundlessness and formlessness, infinite and unrepeatable pattern, embodiment and disembodiment, too; that marbling allows all this draws it close to the element it represents, the presence of the absent essence the women lament: water. Dissolving all into its swirls and whirls of subtle colour and line, marbling as water, water as ink, brings us back to relief, to that painted, that written, that nonverbal release permitted in and prevailing throughout these works. As the planet burns and melts, and our city prepares itself for a third month of merciless heat, relief in the tears, in the shades, in the paint, in the liberated eyes and hands that made it all, does, in fact, give me hope that, though we weep, we will breathe out and, eventually, “rise up” again.
