Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?

Hiwa K blends humor with personal experience to produce a cohesive body of work that at once speaks to contemporary experiences of displacement, belonging and resilience while at the same time producing a highly personal portrait of the artist’s life experiences. Many of the works relate to the artist’s home city of Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, and his experiences of fleeing in refuge and returning many years later. Based ‘on his feet’ Hiwa K often inserts himself into situations of uncertainty, occupying the productive space of the amateur, or the ‘learner’, to query dominant forms of knowledge and the infallibility of academic ways of knowing.

Bringing together works spanning over 10 years of the artist’s practice, this is Hiwa K’s first solo exhibition in Asia and the Middle East, and includes the outdoor installation, One Room Apartment, originally commissioned for Documenta 14 (2017), and a new, interactive large-scale commission.

‘Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?’ is conceived as a three-venue collaboration with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto and the artist Hiwa K.

A guide to the exhibition in English and Arabic can be found at these links.

A Kurdish language guide to the exhibition as well as additional resources in Kurdish are available here.

About Hiwa K

Hiwa K (b. 1975) Lives and works between Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan and Berlin, Germany.
Working across video, performance and installation, Hiwa’s work draws from personal experiences, including family anecdotes, his path through arts education, and daily encounters and occurrences.  Many of his works stress collectivity and participation as part of their development, engaging with and critiquing teaching and learning systems and exploring how knowledge can be gleaned through everyday experience as much as through academic rigors.

Hiwa K’s works were included in group exhibitions at Documenta 14 (2017), 56th Venice Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor (2015), Asian Art Biennial (2019), 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil (2019), Anren Biennale (2019), Yinchuan Biennale (2018), MOMA Ps1, New York (2019),  The Contemporary Jewish Museum (2019), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2019) Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2018), New Museum, New york (2014).
Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Mannheim (2019), S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (2018), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2017), KOW Gallery, Berlin (2016), Kunsthalle C, Stockholm (2015). His work has been awarded the 2019 Hector Preis and in 2016 the Arnold Bode Prize and the Schering Stiftung Art Award.