At age 11, Kahraman fled Iraq to take refuge in Sweden, when life in Iraq was permanently disrupted by the American-led Desert Storm military campaign in 1990. Years later, the artist would develop her distinct visual language; she is known for depictions of alabaster-complexioned dolls and marionettes with coiffed black hair and slanting eyes. But in her solo exhibition “Re-weaving Migrant Inscriptions,” Kahraman’s bevy of naked, Rubenesque figures, hitherto encrypted with signs of rebellion, begin to transform. Their once seductive poses and subservient condition as refugees are fractured by woven surfaces.

The traumatic birth of these mannequins was amplified through the poignant performances of the actors. “She,” or Kahraman’s complex alter ego, was born once her maker had internalized what it meant to be the fetishized other. The novel female embodiment with sumptuous curves of Renaissance figures and vapid doll-like features resembled what the artist was taught to believe—that assimilation came only with the absorption of European ideals and forms. Kahraman’s brown skin and wavy black hair that completely differentiated her from the Europeans in her new hometown disappeared. Instead, her new self metamorphosed into a convoluted amalgamation of East and West. She emerged with a jet-black bouffant, thick dark eyebrows, and pale skin that represented what Kahraman refers to as the “colonized” body. Her painful need to adapt and blend in was evidenced by the scripts in which she wrote, “I wanted to shed my skin and toss it in the trash and never look back again in the hopes that a new skin would eventually grow.”

This cathartic operation of slashing and mending the canvases is heightened in Study 1 and 2, where Kahraman’s figures are fragmented and altered. We lose easy accessibility to their well-defined forms, and we must grapple with their entirely woven surfaces made up of strips of what the artist calls “lost paintings.” Yards of shredded works lay in rolls on the wooden platform that the actors unspooled to reveal traces of deformed figures and damaged skin. They related to a journey in which conjoined bodies formed by numerous strips would “transform” each painting.