Two smaller canvases stay close to lived observation. Burnt Almonds comes from a still taken when she returned to her ancestral village, recently destroyed by fire, and witnessed the tree her grandmother used to climb as a young girl fully burn down, an attempt to immortalise something that has already disappeared. My Grandmother’s Backyard depicts clothes being hand-washed in a traditional bucket, a small action that says a lot about the invisible, highly gendered labour of women in home-making and caregiving.
Web Res | JdeWaart | 24.7.26-332 (1)
Havva Malyalızade | AKI Academy of Arts & Design, Enschede
For an overview of available works please click the link below
AVAILABLE WORK BY HAVVA MALYALIZADEFor Best of Graduates 2026, Havva Malyalızade (AKI ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design, ArtEZ University of the Arts) presents Remnants of a Memory, an exhibition of oil paintings and a documentary video that grew from research she gathered after realising the lack of women’s voices while writing her thesis on women and displacement. Since it was nearly impossible to find any information from a woman’s perspective, she started to uncover the untold histories of the women in her own family. The exhibition consists of her documentary video work, tracing the first generation of trauma, and her paintings, as a second generation of trauma healing through talking and uncovering, using art to spark a conversation on belonging and identity, and to create a space to talk about each other’s pain.
Remnants of a memory, Documentary, 2026 | Documentary | 9 min, 29 sec
Havva Malyalızade
A Child Who Was Never Born, 2026 | Oil on canvas | 230 x 140 cm
Havva Malyalızade
The paintings translate these inherited stories into image. A Child Who Was Never Born comes from a story of Havva’s grandmother: fleeing with her family, the mother went into premature labour, and the baby brother, born early amid the attacks, passed away after three days, her grandmother still talks about him, though she cannot remember where he was buried. Muamma and Displaced form a pair referring to old and lost memories: Havva was always told she looks like her great grandmother, but she has never seen her face, since the family photos left on the walls during the displacement disappeared forever. Muamma refers to the forgotten faces of the women in her family, while Displaced depicts the great grandmother in the safe zone tents while trying to flee.
Something so Familiar is a physicalised search for home, home-making and the invisible side of displacement through the perspectives of women who had to create ‘homes’ for newer generations in unfamiliar surroundings. The Village, imagined from memories told by her grandmother and her father, draws attention to women’s resilience and resistance, reclaiming their truth from a history of war that is always told from a male-dominant perspective. Mayi (fluid/liquid), reminiscent of a madonna and child, emerged when Havva learned that child loss and miscarriages run in her family, depicting mother and child in a ghost-like state.
Something so familiar, 2026 | Oil on canvas | 250 x 200 cm
Havva Malyalızade
About the Artist
As a Cypriot artist based in the Netherlands, Havva Malyalızade’s practice unfolds at the intersection of memory, identity, and cultural displacement. Rooted in personal and broader diasporic narratives, her work engages with the emotional and ideological issues shaped by migration and longing. With the silent histories carried by the women in her family, she explores how to weave together past and present through her lens. “To exist is to carry histories, written and unwritten, on one’s body,” she writes. “How many generations will it take for the wound of displacement to heal?”
Havva Malyalızade (b. 2004) graduated in 2026 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from ArtEZ University of the Arts. She is the founder of Collective Irritation (Cyprus/Netherlands, 2025–present), an interdisciplinary collective focusing on gender, labour, postcolonialism, and sexuality. Through her work she positions art as a form of resistance and reconciliation, an intimate archive, a site of both rupture and continuity, of ancestral echo and personal belonging.
