Bessma Khalaf

Bessma Khalaf is an immigrant artist from Iraq, who focuses her work on multimedia performance. Khalaf is a multimedia artist, so she incorporates the use of several different mediums, including but not limited to photography, video, and performance art. Most of Khalaf's creative processes take place in her studio, which is located in Oakland, California.
Khalaf moved to the US when she was a child and has been creating artwork in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 14 years. She immigrated to the US at the age of 12 in fear of the religious persecution she would face in Iraq as a Catholic woman. Her work tends to be experimental, with a primary focus on the destruction of landscapes; she feels that this is due to her constantly being surrounded by her homeland being bombed as a child. This internalized frustration and conflict between her religious affiliation and her home country's actions against civilians, as well as the United States' militaristic stance on Iraq, has proven to be the backbone of her work. Other dominant themes of Khalaf's work include her personal struggles of finding her place in the world as well as general feelings of bitterness that immigrants living in the US often face.
==Early life and education==
Bessma Khalaf was born in 1978 in Baghdad, Iraq. In 1990, at the age of 12, Khalaf moved to the United States with her family, living in San Diego. She was educated at San Diego State University where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in 2002 and her BFA in 2003. She went on to earn a Masters in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, in 2007. Khalaf met her husband, photographer Nick Karvounis, when they were grad students at CCA together. Since then, they have worked professionally together in several different mediums. Khalaf's work has been exhibited across the United States in San Francisco, New York, Santa Monica, and Baltimore. She now lives in Oakland where her studio is located, and continues to showcase her work throughout the Bay Area.
==Works==
One of her most well-known works is Knock Out (2008). This multimedia piece depicts Khalaf punching through paper that displays American landscapes. Knock Out uses American landscapes to depict immigrant experiences in America. Similarly, Khalaf's Standing on a Beach (2004) displays a piece of paper, which has a video of the ocean playing on it, burning. In her video performance This Land Is My Land (2006), Khalaf is shown eating a sculpture of land that is made out of food, and spitting it back out. Torch Song (2018) is an exhibition that is filled with works of black and white destructed landscape photographs. Each work has either been burned, smashed, or consumed to show that beauty can still be found in destruction. Still following the theme of destruction, Khalaf's piece Monument (2009) is reflecting on inevitable defeat through six hours of sitting on an ice horse in Stockholm, which ends in her falling to the ground. Throughout another long duration of time, Khalaf for her work Tree Painting (2007) painted a dead Christmas tree green for five hours to display art's connection to rebirth. Khalaf's 2012 piece The Long Goodbye, a 12-hour video of a hand pouring candle wax out of a frame, and her exhibition Re-Enchanter were featured in Artforum magazine.
==Awards and scholarships==
Khalaf won the California College of the Arts Scholarship and The Byron Meyer Scholarship awards in 2005. In 2006, she additionally won three more awards; they were from The Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in Fine Art, California College of the Art Scholarship, and The Byron Meyer Scholarship. She also received The Vision From The New California Award in 2012.
Category:1978 births
Category:Immigrants
Category:People from Baghdad
Category:San Diego State University alumni