Cooking with Mama

Until last year, I was not aware of Hiwa K. I’ve discovered one of his works titled Moon Calendar in “The Rest of Now”, an exhibition curated by the Raqs Media Collective as a part of Manifesta 7 in Ex Alumix, Bolzano/Bozen.

Moon Calendar was a two-screen video installation showing the same performance recorded as a rehearsal in Iraq and as a public event in Germany. During the performance, Hiwa K was trying to tap-dance to his own heartbeat, which was broadcasted through speakers. As the dance was going on, he was losing control over his feet, unable to keep up with his heartbeat after a certain point.

After seeing this piece, I wanted to learn more and I’ve discovered some very interesting propositions such as Cooking with Mama (part 1 & part 2) and Estrangement (http://estrangementproject.blogspot.com/).

As described in Goldsmith Digital Studios‘ “Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance” programme, Cooking with Mama is “a webcast event in which I (Hiwa K) am cooking with friends according to the instructions of my Mother, living in Iraq, who is giving them on a video messenger. The pattern is that she shows and tells what to do, I translate, then we follow her instructions and show the results of all phases of cooking for evaluation. I also introduce my friends to her and translate small conversations between her and my friends. Finally, we eat together.” This event was done for the very first time in 2006, after four years the artist left Iraq. He didn’t see his mother at all during this time period.

The second project I particularly enjoyed is titled Estrangement. As the founders define it, “the concept of Estrangement developed through a series of discussions and collaborative projects between Iraqi artist Hiwa K and Polish curator Aneta Szylak as an attempt to create a form for mutual translation and collaborative work that is not restricted to one cultural format. Estrangement seeks to capture the tension between European cultures and what was once constructed as the “Orient”, investigated from different European cultural contexts of London, Gent and Gdansk, as well as Sulaimany.”

As the fourth part of Tactical Networks and Simulations I decided to ask for an interview with Hiwa K. I found him through Facebook, and sent him a message to see if he were interested in participating in my project. He answered positively and we did an audiovisual chat/interview through Skype. As you may feel while watching the video, the interview ended up being very spontaneous and lasted for more than an hour. We discussed mainly about these two previously mentioned propositions, as well as music, the current social and political situation of Iraq and the use of Internet in a more general way. The online video is an edited proposition.

Hiwa K is a visual artist and musician born in Iraq, living in Germany. His major interest circles around the notion of event, performativity, as well as the figure of the artist as an amateur. Since 2005, he has been developing a series of projects involving paradoxes of cultural competence, participation, dissemination of knowledge and distribution of the event.