Hiwa K: Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach

Hiwa K

Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach

Gods Wearing Pots, 2018 Forged stainless steel Salute, Son of Thunder, 2018 8 drawings, ink on paper Martinete, 2018 From a live performance on May 2, 2018, at the New Museum, New York City Salute, Son of Thunder, a series of drawings in gold ink, and Gods Wearing Pots, a forged steel 17th-century-style morion, or helmet, were both inspired by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s text El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno/The First New Chronicle and Good Government from the early 17th century, in which he outlines Andean history, illuminates various aspects of Inca society, and records his observation of Spanish colonial rule, including horrific behavior by the conquistadors. In particular, Hiwa K was inspired by Guaman Poma’s chronicle of the first encounter between the Incas and Francisco Pizarro and his men.

The typical European narrative positions the colonizers as gods and the natives as savages.

However, Hiwa K posits that perhaps the Incas thought the conquistadors were gifts from god instead; according to Guaman Poma, a spy for Atahualpa, the last Inca Emperor, assumed the conquistadors arrived wearing pots they could be cooked in. These “pots” were actually helmets much like Hiwa K’s forged metal sculpture. The artist presents the helmet upside down, like a cauldron, as a reference to this misperception. His intentional inversion may also connote the many sides to a story, the various perspectives and misinterpretations, especially when it comes to how we receive strangers in general and migrants in particulary. Initially, Hiwa K hoped to use his scaled-up helmet to cook pascha, a Middle Eastern sheep’s head stew, a dish so foreign to an American audience that he thought it might provoke disgust, or at the very least, a direct confrontation with Otherness. Due to a misunderstanding, the blacksmith treated

the helmet with a chemical that ultimately rendered it unsuitable for cooking. Although completely accidental, the error contributes another layer to the project’s initial concept around misperception and misinterpretation.

In Hiwa K’s accompanying series, Salute, Son of Thunder, drawings and text in gold ink depict information the artist gathered while conducting research for Gods Wearing Pots, including from a visit to the Pizarro House Museum in Trujillo, Spain, where he was inspired by the conquistador’s helmet. Close inspection reveals additional text etched into the paper that provides lesser known or hypothetical narratives about Pizarro and the Spanish conquest.

The audio component included in the exhibition, Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach, is the documentation of a performance by Hiwa K and flamenco singer Ismael Fernandez that took place at the New Museum in New York City on May 2, 2018. The song is a martinete, or a flamenco palo. Taking the form of four eight-syllable lines, this palo, a song of gypsy blacksmiths, usually would be accompanied by percussion, specifically a hammer and anvil, rather than a guitar. At the New Museum, the performer repeatedly struck Hiwa K’s forged metal helmet, Gods Wearing Pots. The artist notes feelings of mourning and guilt in the song, perhaps for the Spanish conquistadors’ crimes. Hiwa K and Fernandez also selected this song because of its lyrical emphasis on walking and moving forward rather than looking back — an idea touched upon in several other works in this exhibition. Those include Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), in which the artist makes an arduous journey on foot similar to one made by many migrants, and perhaps even Cooking with Mama, in which Hiwa K’s longing for his mother and her Kurdish cooking plays out through the preparation of a communal meal using family recipes, with the artist’s mother participating via Skype. caption

Cooking with Mama, 2006 SD Video, documentation of performances in Mainz, Germany 19 minutes 48 seconds In 2006, Hiwa K began cooking Kurdish meals with his friends from art school in Mainz, Germany. He had not seen his mother in over four years and he missed her and the comfort of traditional Kurdish dishes. The group of friends would cook periodically for the entire academy, with Hiwa K’s mother participating via Skype. His first encounter with the digital version of his mother was frustrating. She was so close yet so far away; present but absent.

This project is about the comfort and nostalgia associated with food, the artist’s inability to visit his family due to his migrant status, and his attempt to find a connection to home and his identity. It also was a way to introduce others to his culture and several-centuries-old traditional recipes through the communal preparation and consumption of food. For Hiwa K, this project is about “closeness, about sharing, and about understanding others.”

A View from Above, 2017 Double-channel HD video, color, sound 12 minutes 27 seconds In A View from Above, the narrator (voiced

by Hiwa K) notes that in order to qualify as a refugee, one has to come from, or at least prove that one comes from, an area declared as an unsafe zone. He contends safe zones are fictitious places that only live “in the maps and minds of European bureaucrats.”

First created for Documenta 14 in 2017, A View from Above recounts the fictional story of M, whose status as a refugee is initially denied after his town is determined to be “safe.” He then decides to claim a different location as home, a city he calls K, which has 0° Blind Spot, Where Beloved is…, 2017–18, Mixed media

been pre-determined as “unsafe.” He draws a map, learns every aspect of the geography, talks to people from the area, and ultimately fools the official conducting his interview, who fact-checks M’s account of his adopted hometown via a map. M immediately receives refugee status, while thousands of others who are actually from the town and other unsafe zones have to wait years and are often rejected because, ironically, their knowledge of their home is from a lived experience, on the ground, rather than from the point of view of an outsider whose only reference to this place is through official documents and maps. In creating this work, Hiwa K continually shifts our perspective from a bird’s-eye view to a

view from the ground as we navigate a rubble-filled town. To create A View from Above, Hiwa K filmed a model from 1955 in the Stadtmuseum, Kassel, Germany (where this work would ultimately be exhibited). The model depicts the decimated city after the Allied bombing on October 22, 1943.

Over 75% of the city was destroyed and nearly 10,000 people were killed.

Hiwa K’s use of this model reminds us of Kassel’s role, both past and present, as a manufacturer and distributor of weapons.

The title for the exhibition at the Van Every/Smith Galleries was derived from a line in this work based on an Arabic saying: “The eye can see far but the hand is too short to reach.”

The narrator notes that eyes can reach astronomical distances, to black holes, yet voices can only reach a few hundred meters, and hands, less than a meter. He instructs M to give vision to his hand and have a voice that can reach as far as the eye; essentially, a change of perspective is needed. Just as in Pre-Image,

truth, reality, and time are shaky and fragmented, especially for someone living in a precarious situation.

For A Few Socks of Marbles, 2012 Vinyl wall graphics, metal tools, stone balls, Shirwal pants HD video with sound, 3 minutes 56 seconds Until he was nine years old, Hiwa K, who is Kurdish, lived with his family, first in Baghdad and then in an Arab neighborhood in Sulaymaniyan before moving to a Kurdish neighborhood. Whether in Arab or Kurd neighborhoods, Hiwa K was ostracized, recognized as a Kurd while in the Arab neighborhood and called an Arab in his new Kurdish neighborhood, due to his accent and attire.

During the summer, games with marbles were common in both neighborhoods.

The vinyl wall graphics in Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach, depict the horizontal hand position used in Mushien, a Kurdish marble game, and the vertical hand position typical of Tannab, an Arabic marble game. The Kurdish game is complicated, with a

lot of rules. Typically, only a few marbles are won or lost at a time. Players make their most important marble from a stone, by hand, as seen in the accompanying video; it often takes several months to create the perfect round marble. Tannab is less complex, with almost no restrictions, yet can result in big wins or losses.

Seduced by the ease of the game and potential profits, Hiwa K convinced the neighborhood kids to play Tannab, which was far easier for him because of his familiarity with the vertical hand position. He recalls, “I managed to bankrupt the whole street. Then afterwards I sold the marbles back to them. It was 1981. I remember I earned one dinar at that time and I gave it to my mother to buy me a pair of Kurdish Shirwal.

From then on I was accepted as one of them and no one called me an Arab again.”

For Hiwa K, the two versions of the game represent the different economic structures at work in the region: the Arab game is similar to the Western-influenced neoliberal economic policy in Iraqi Kurdistan, while the Kurdish game represents the more traditional, regulated economy of the previous decades.

This allusion to the horizontal and vertical is repeated in several works, including Pre-Image and A View from Above. Hiwa K notes this is, in part, an analogy to military actions: “The Iraq-Iran war was a horizontal war because they were getting weapons more or less from the same countries and it lasted eight years.

In the Gulf War, the technology was quite different. The planes were so high we couldn’t see them; the Iraqi weapons couldn’t reach the American air force.”

The Bell Project, 2007–2015 Two-channel video installation, SD and HD video, color, sound, with English subtitles 26 minutes 3 seconds/35 minutes 34 seconds Typical of Hiwa K’s work, there is a disorienting nature to The Bell Project, as the viewer attempts to absorb various images, multiple spoken languages, and English subtitles all at once. We move forward and backward in time Moon Calendar, 2007, Still from Single-channel SD video, color, sound, 12 minutes 16 seconds

in this poetic work in which Hiwa K links two disparate places — a metal scrapyard in northern Iraq and a 700-year old bell foundry in Italy — by turning collected metal weapons into a beautiful, ornate, yet non-functioning, cast bell.

Hiwa K’s act reverses a common wartime practice: throughout history, metal objects such as bells were often scrapped in the service of weapon manufacturing. This eightyear-long project was inspired by Hiwa K’s previous project What the Barbarians Did Not Do, Did the Barberini, based on a story about the Vatican melting down bronze from the ceiling of the Parthenon, believed to have been used to create a sculpture for Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) in the 17th century.

The two-channel video installation tells two stories. One, on the left, is inspired by Nazhad, a Kurdish entrepreneur with a somewhat controversial business — profiting from the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) and both Gulf Wars (1990–91, 2003–11) by recycling found waste metal from the battlefields, including mines, bombs, bullets, and parts of planes and tanks.

Throughout the video, Nazhad demonstrates his knowledge of weapons, including the country of origin and the kind of metal. The scraps are melted into ingots (bricks) and sold to neighboring countries.

The material for Hiwa K’s project was all collected in Iraq and then transported to Crema, Italy, where the bell was eventually cast at a 700-year-old foundry started by a relative of Octavio, an elderly man seen in the video on the right. The decoration on Hiwa K’s bell depicts events that occurred while it was in production, including the destruction of artifacts from the Mosul Museum by ISIS. In the unveiling of his bell from the mold, Hiwa K considers the artifacts as being metaphorically unearthed or re-discovered.

To complete the project, Hiwa K had to rely on Nazhad’s weapons and metallurgical expertise in order to gather 300 kilograms of bronze with 79% copper and 21% tin; this ratio would create a bell that sounded a B-flat minor chord. He was also dependent on Octavio

Hiwa K enters the protest with a harmonica while his friend Daroon Othman plays a guitar. Amplifying their music through megaphones, they transform composer Ennio Morricone’s song Man with a Harmonica, from the film Once Upon a Time in the West, into a battle cry of sorts.

In 1987 and 1988, Saddam Hussein used poison gas to murder over 5,000 Kurdish people in Iraq.

The title of this work, This Lemon Tastes of Apples, references survivors’ accounts that the gas smelled like apples,1 and to the use of lemons to neutralize the impact of tear gas, as seen in Hiwa K’s documentation of the 2011 protest.

Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), 2017 Single-channel HD video, color, sound 17 minutes 40 seconds This Lemon Tastes of Apple, 2011, Still from Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 13 minutes 26 seconds

and his team, who refused to allow Hiwa K to record some of his family’s 700-year-old bell-making techniques. When the bell was completed, it was first displayed in the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, once the home of naval warship construction, now an exhibition space for the prestigious Venice Biennale.

Moon Calendar, 2007 Single-channel SD video, color, sound 12 minutes 16 seconds Moon Calendar is the documentation of the creative process and rehearsal for an unrealized dance performance at Amna Souraka, the Red Security Building, in northern Iraq.

Previously, the building complex was used

by Saddam Hussein to jail and torture political prisoners. Today, it is the location of the Iraqi National Museum of War Crimes. The title, Moon Calendar, may refer to the (perhaps romanticized) way prisoners measure the passage of time by recording the cycles or phases of the moon.

During the performance, Hiwa K attempts to dance to the rhythm of his own heartbeat,

monitored through a stethoscope. As he continues to dance, his heart and feet fall out of sync, but he attempts to regain the connection. Drowning out all surrounding noises, Hiwa K lives in the movement of his body and the internal sound of blood pulsing through his body, the rhythm made by the contractions of his heart. His dance steps make the internal, external, and the invisible, visible. For Hiwa K, dancing in a place of trauma is not about denying or making light of the horrific actions that once took place at Amna Souraka. It is more about resilience, the power of mind and body, the cycles of nature, and the healing potential of art and dance.

This Lemon Tastes of Apple, 2011 Single-channel HD video, color, sound 13 minutes 26 seconds This Lemon Tastes of Apple documents an intervention by the artist on April 17, 2011, the last day of legal protest in a two-month long struggle in Sulaymaniyah. Protesters were calling for bureaucratic transparency and equal access to the country’s wealth.

0° Blind Spot, Where Beloved is…, 2017–18 Mixed media Two years in the works, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) premiered at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, in 2017. The narrative is a fictional version of the artist’s lived experience — a journey on foot from Iraq, through Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy, in search of asylum. In Pre-Image, Hiwa K balances the accompanying sculpture, 0° Blind Spot, Where Beloved is… on his nose, a practice that took several months for the artist to perfect. The sculpture, fabricated from a metal pole and motorbike mirrors, serves as a tool for navigating unfamiliar territories. In the video, Hiwa K never looks directly at anything, not the ground under his feet nor the horizon ahead. He experiences his surroundings only in the form of reflections — fragmented, shaky, and unstable. Traversing the unknown in this way induced panic for the artist, who constantly feared losing balance of the mirrored apparatus — a symbol for any number of tools one may rely on during the treacherous journey to refuge.

Mlodoch, Karin. “The Indelible Smell of Apples: Poison Gas Survivors in Halabja, Kurdistan-Iraq, and Their Struggle for Recognition.” In Friedrich B., Hoffmann D., Renn J., Schmaltz F., Wolf M. (eds) One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-31951664-6_18#citeas

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Born in 1975 in Sulaymaniyan, Kurdistan, Iraq, Hiwa K creates sculptures, videos, and performances that are often more about the process than the product. Weaving together oral history, anecdotes, political events, and personal memories — including his own journey on foot from Iraq to Germany, seeking asylum — Hiwa K’s participatory, collaborative works explore migration, colonialism, war, protest, violence, and identity. Using video to document his actions and interactions, he illuminates otherness and the in-between through his occupation of diverse roles, such as artist, musician, interviewer, instigator, and infiltrator. He plays a harmonica while walking through a crowded protest, dances within the walls of an abandoned prison, melts down old weapons to cast an ornate bell, and cooks a communal meal with his mother via Skype, in an effort to shift our perspective both literally and symbolically between the sky and the ground, the individual and the collective, place and placelessness, belonging and alienation, East and West, terror and beauty.

Hiwa K has had major exhibitions at S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent; New Museum, New York, Documenta 14, Kassel and Athens; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Venice Biennale; La Triennale, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Manifesta 7, Bolzano. He is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the Arnold Bode Prize; Schering Stiftung Art Award; Kunstfonds Grant; and Goethe Institut Grant. Hiwa K lives and works in Berlin.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Endowment; Davidson College Justice, Equality and Community Grant; Friends of the Arts; and Malu Alvarez ’02.

Hiwa K: Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach Publication ©2019 This publication was produced in conjunction with Hiwa K: Eyes See Far, Hands Too Short to Reach at the Van Every/Smith Galleries, January 14–March 1, 2019.

Lia Newman, Director/Curator Allison Tolbert, Curatorial Assistant Designer: Graham McKinney Editor: Stephanie Cash cover: For A Few Socks of Marbles, 2012, Vinyl wall graphics

Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street, Davidson, North Carolina 28035 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org

below: The Bell Project, 2007–2015, Still from Two-channel video installation, SD and HD video, color, sound, with English subtitles, 26 minutes 3 seconds/35 minutes 34 seconds

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All works courtesy of the artist, KOW Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan/Lucca unless otherwise specified.

ISBN: 978-1-890573-28-7