Help Hayv & Her Family Recover from Altadena Fire

Help Hayv & Her Family Recover from Altadena Fire

Hayv Kahraman and her family are so grateful to everyone who has asked to provide immediate support to their family in the wake of the Eaton Fire.

Hayv is a gifted artist and painter whose work reflects her life journey as a child survivor of the 1991 Gulf War on Iraq, which made her and countless others refugees. Her family fled the war in 1992 and became undocumented asylum seekers in Sweden where she grew up. She then moved to Italy and the United States.

She chose Altadena — on the outskirts of L.A. — as the community to buy her first home and plant roots as a family drawn by the strong sense of community and the fresh air — both of which she and her family have lost for the foreseeable future.

She wrote the following reflection 10 days after fleeing her home with her family in the first hour of the Altadena Fire. It is followed by more info about their current situation and needs…

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I don’t have many memories of the war because my mind has chosen to protect me, but one clear image has been lodged in my body. That of myself, a 10 year old girl looking out her living room window in Baghdad and seeing air raids falling from the sky. I remember feeling that they looked like deadly fireworks.

On Tuesday the 7th, I felt the same thing as I peeked out my 10 year old daughter’s window. This time it was a raging fire on the mountains very close to us.

I know what it feels like to forcefully evacuate your home with the possibility of never returning. I know what it feels like to drive around your neighborhood and see beloved buildings reduced to rubble. I know the smell of burning homes. Of shattered lives. I know that panic in my body very well.

For the past few months I’ve been painting fires. Lots of fires. I’ve called them my “ghost fires”.

There is a children’s story I grew up hearing in Kurdistan (in northern Iraq) that was told to me by my late great aunt.

It’s called “The Louse and the Flea”, a somewhat dystopian story, narrated in a cascading format following the journey of multi-species creatures. It begins with the flea and the louse sitting on the edge of a concave fire oven called a tannour. The flea accidentally slips and falls into the oven and explodes.

The louse feels devastated and starts shedding all her hair. When the crow flies over and hears this news, he starts plucking out all his feathers. The palm tree hears the news, feels the grief and starts shedding her fronds and fruit. Then, the water buffalo breaks her leg and the river dries herself up. It ultimately ends with the mother sitting upon a convex oven called a Saj, burning her own womb.

It’s an apocalyptic story that highlights our entangled and relational more than human world. Perhaps it’s a story of climate change, fires and/or extinction. Perhaps of war-torn ecologies or the violence of settler colonialism or the Anthropocene. What is clear is that we are left with a feeling of connectivity to our more than human kin by means of ruin.

My ghost fires are just that: specters that haunt. I ask, how can we learn from them?

I’ve grown to embrace my rootlessness and see myself as someone who floats in and out, akin to a gentle wave. When I bought my first home in Altadena this wave somehow became more anchored. Possibly more rhythmic and less sporadic. I loved this feeling. And this is what I want to find again. A rhythmic wave.

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Fortunately, Hayv and her family made it out and their home remains standing BUT it will be UNINHABITABLE for the next year as it goes through the necessary steps to get decontaminated, which means they are homeless and uncertain at this time.

Nearly everything they had in the house will have to be removed because of smoke damage and they will be moving into a temporary apartment in the coming weeks, hopefully. Their daughter’s public elementary school also burned down, creating additional distress as they search for both a place to live temporarily and a new school.

Hayv's most recent shows include a traveling solo exhibition titled “Look Me in the Eyes” first shown at ICASF and now open at the Frye museum in Seattle. Hayv was also included in the 2024 Sydney Biennale and the Hawaii Triennal opening next month.