ART CITIES:Berlin-Hiwa K
Hiwa K’s works escape normative aesthetics but give a possibility of another vibration to vernacular forms, oral histories, modes of encounter and political situations. The repository of his references consists of stories told by family members and friends, found situations as well as everyday forms that are the products of pragmatics and necessity. He continuously critiques the art education system and the professionalization of art practice, as well as the myth of the individual artist.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kow Archive
Hiwa K in “The Bell Project”, reverses the known mechanism: Cannons to Bells! But his project is also a narrative about the violent transformations of the Middle East in the recent past. Often, in times of war, whatever metal could be found was melted down to be cast into implements of war. Also bells, whose high-quality bronze gave some artillery its tools for the attack. Hiwa K observed a reverse melting process and then took it to a symbolic extreme himself. Nazhad, a Kurdish entrepreneur from a settlement south of Sulaimany in Kurdish Iraq – his story captured on film by Hiwa K – turned his passion for melting metal into a profession and a business. He specializes in recycling the battlefield waste left behind by the Iraq-Iran War (1980 to 1988) and the two Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003). Nazhad buys and collects old mines, bombs, bullets, parts of military planes and tanks, and other remnants of military operations and liquifies them, casting them into ingots, which he trades, or into other useful forms. In the film, Nazhad takes us through the environment of his life and work. Along the way, he unfolds his practical expertise – a body of knowledge that has grown over the years – about the metals themselves, but also about the origins and cycle of the original wea-pons from which they are extracted, to a large part from the United States, Germany, Italy, China, Japan and Russia. Elsewhere, the camera follows several men casting a large bell in Italy from material sourced from Nazhad‘s operation, following centuries of tradition in a mold made of sand, where the metal cools and then the finished 700-kilogram artifact is excavated. Motifs that decorate the outside of the bell also emerge from the sand in the process. As in archaeological excavations, historical ornaments and figure reliefs are uncovered that date back to the Mesopotamian era. These are motifs from objects dating back to the 3rd millennium BC that were destroyed by the Islamic State during the work on The Bell project. Hiwa K applied those symbols to the bell, in which they re-turn as a memento mori. And so there it is, the bell, at KOW on the first floor. An archaic sounding body, the war devices that have violently and fatally upheaved the Middle East in the interest of various nations, systems and regimes, and transforms them into a clear, old familiar vibrating sound that creates shiver.
Photo: Hiwa K, The Bell Project (Videostill), 2007-2015, Two channel video installation, SD & HD video, color, sound with English subtitles, © Hiwa K, Courtesy the artist and Kow
Info: Kow, Lindenstraße 35, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 18/6-24/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kow-berlin.com
