Location: Oakland, CA / Vallejo, CA
Medium: Photography, installation, performance
Website: bessmakhalaf.com
Bessma Khalaf was born in 1978 in Baghdad, Iraq, and emigrated to San Diego, California in 1990, just before the First Gulf War. She has never returned to Iraq. Growing up as a Catholic Iraqi refugee in the United States — in a country actively waging war on her homeland — gave shape to a practice built around conflict, landscape, and the violent entanglement of image and reality. She received her BA from San Diego State University in 2002 and her MFA in photography from the California College of the Arts in 2007. She has lived and worked in Oakland ever since, and is represented by Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
Her work has been exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and the ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. She is the recipient of a Murphy Cadogan Fellowship and the Vision From The New California Award, and has been reviewed in Artforum, Zyzzyva, and the San Francisco Tribune.
Khalaf works in photography, video, sculpture, and performance, deploying processes of deliberate degradation — burning, smashing, shattering, melting, consuming — as her primary artistic method. Her photographs often begin as landscapes, which she then physically destroys or intervenes in before re-photographing the results. In her Torch Song series, she sets sections of photographs of the California landscape on fire and photographs what remains after extinguishing the burn, creating images where absence becomes a relic, and destruction opens onto something generative. Her relationship to the American landscape is shaped by a deep ambivalence: she finds it vast and beautiful, and simultaneously complicit in the destruction of her homeland.
More recently her practice has taken on a ritual dimension, drawing on her ancient Chaldean heritage and the spiritual traditions of Mesopotamia. Works in her Ritual series use charred tree stumps salvaged from California's burned forests, ceremonial candles, and divination as frameworks for exploring humanity's estranged relationship with the natural world.
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