Hayv Kahraman’s design for Sanctuary borrows imagery from her 2015 painting Kachachi, titled after a colloquial Iraqi term for “smuggler,” which is scrawled in Arabic script across the bottom of the piece. She describes the scene as a childhood memory of her family hiring a smuggler to help them flee to Sweden. “When you are displaced because of war, you somehow get stuck in the past. I think this is specifically true when it comes to Iraqi refugees, because we are haunted by this sense of the glorious past—the cradle of civilization becomes something to focus on when your current situation is desolate. But as you flee to the West, you are obliged to assimilate,” she says. “In this process I lost who I thought I was or could be. Introducing memory allows me to archive those lost histories.”
