Critical Gallery: Kholod Hawash

KHOLOD HAWASH (b.1977) is an Iraqi-born visual artist living and working in Finland. When Iraq became too dangerous for her and her artist husband — because of their profession — they left the country and ended up first in Jordan, then in Finland, in January 2019, with the help of Artists at Risk organization.

Hawash makes textile art. She makes her works by cutting shapes out of different colored fabrics and hand-stitching them onto a rectangular base fabric. The technique is much the same as for making a quilt, but Hawash uses it to create painterly images — in her hands, pieces of fabric become shapes and colors and the sewing thread becomes a line drawing.

Hawash’s works contain metaphorical, figurative situations or events — they are therefore allegories. She is a feminist artist: the protagonist of most of her works is a female character seeking freedom and emancipation.

Her subjects are simple and the message — at least the top layer of the message — is often immediately clear. One work depicts a chained woman with keys floating around her. In another, two naked women are writhing around in a game of snakes and ladders. In a third, a woman with a pistol in her hand looks at us, but a flower bursts from the barrel of the pistol and she is allied with a bird, a lizard and a blood-red sun.

These visual ideas are striking, immediately understandable, but for any artist they are also difficult, because in most hands they would turn into banalities. Not in Hawash’s hands, as she executes her visual ideas with such a delicate and nuanced style.

She uses dazzlingly saturated, often complementary, colors, but also intersperses and juxtaposes them with muted colors or patterned planes, and yet the whole is never muddy, but bursts with life — which means that it contains both harmonious and dissonant contrasts. Because she draws by stitching, a method less nimble than pencil or brush, she has learned to express as much as possible with as few lines as possible.

Thanks to her vibrant style, Hawash is able to realize a very simple visual idea in a touching way… …and she is also able to inject a simple visual idea with multiple layers of meaning. In English, there is a saying, “you can’t eat your cake and keep it too”, which is used to describe a choice situation where two good options are mutually exclusive. But they are not always. Like a good poet, Hawash can create works that are in some ways as clear as road signs, but at the same time have equally important ambiguities that defy literal interpretation.

“Kholod Hawash is one of my favorite Finnish and/or Iraqi contemporary artists. I am not alone in my opinion. Her works are in the collections of Kiasma , among others. In 2022, she was awarded the Willian Thuring Foundation Prize by the Finnish Art Association. In 2024, she represented Finland in the Nordic Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, in Lap-See Lam’s working group, which made the multidisciplinary work The Altersea Opera.” says Teemu Mäki.