What cannot be said will be wept

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present What cannot be said will be wept, an exhibition of new paintings by Hayv Kahraman. The exhibition draws on Kahraman’s personal history as a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee and the loss of her home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires to consider the effects of systems that separate people from land, ancestry, ecology and embodied forms of knowledge.

"One of the deepest spells modernity has cast upon me is that of separation. Yes, I was extracted from my land through systemic violence, occupation and domination, this is one form of rupture. But there is another, more insidious severing I am only now beginning to name: a disconnection from my environment, from the natural world, from the human and more-than-human and from a kind of knowing behind knowing.

Modernity and coloniality has imposed the illusion that I am an isolated being, that the earth is not on my side. It has thinned my capacity for wonder, eroded my ability to dream within both the known and unknown worlds. It has distanced me from my indigenous ontologies that understand existence as entangled, relational and inseparable. In its wake, it has inscribed a betrayal into my body, carried consciously or not, shaping how I meet the ecologies around me, how I trust, how I relate. These works enact a remembering with the natural world, where entangled relationality is slowly taking shape."

– Hayv Kahraman