[Winter 2023]

By Jill Glessing

The Power Plant, Toronto
20.05.2022 — 28.08.2022

[Excerpt]

Hiwa K manages an uneasy balance among being an artist, an activist, a teacher, a philosopher, a musician, and, since his recent return to Iraq, a farmer. Resistant to the professional and academic boxes that most artists and intellectuals inhabit (he calls himself an “extellectual”), he values instead a kind of grassroots epistemology – knowledge produced and shared on the ground within an everyday community. Though Hiwa K’s work is informed by his own experience as a Kurdish Iraqi who fled the repression of Saddam Hussein’s regime, he wants audiences to understand the substrates of such problems, prominent among them Western ideologies and dominance. His videos, installations, performances, photographs, and drawings often interweave critiques of Western geopolitics with philosophical and poetic ruminations and personal anecdotes. His engagement with these topics and his resistance to institutional art make for some interesting tensions within his role as an artist exhibiting at Toronto’s The Power Plant…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Hiwa K, Do you remember what you are burning? — Jill Glessing ]