On Transformation, Transition, and Transcendence

Hiwa K in conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

In this intimate conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Hiwa K takes us on a poetic journey of his artistic practice through the concepts of transformation, transition, and transcendence.

Hiwa K, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), 2017, video still. Single channel HD video. Courtesy of the artist; KOW, Berlin; and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan-Lucca. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: It is a great pleasure to see you and to have this chance to talk to you again dear Hiwa. It has been very moving for me to experience these three epic works of yours. It has been a real blessing, to say the least, so I want us to have a conversation around them.

The first thing I want to point out is that in looking at Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (2017), View from Above (2017), and Nazha and the Bell Project (2007–15), three main motions come to mind: transformation, transition, and transcendence. Transformation for obvious reasons—be it the bullets or bells—and varying forms of passage or the transformation of human beings while moving from A to B, which is also transition.

In that process of transition, there is also a process of transcendence. For example, you talk about your father’s passing, and music plays an important role in that transcendence. I would like you to take these three things and run with them.

Hiwa K: Thank you, Bona. As always, your questions are new for me. [laughs] First of all, we have to make a distinction between change and transformation. Change is about the past, but transformation is about the unlimited potential of the future. Like the distinction between equity and equality. One of the reasons I gave up my studies at the conservatory was my professor Paco Peña’s method. He said that the fingers of the right hand should all submit to the wrist, which is regulating the movements of each finger . . . I always had a problem with it, as I was thinking that each finger has its own momentum of playing the string and the whole hand should adapt and assist that finger in order to make an honest move. I see the notion of democracy in that way, the distinction between diversity and inclusion. That momentum is a stretch (constancy) rather than an instance, as it comes from a certain mood (pre-playing the note), is articulated (the moment of playing it), and is for the sake of an unknown potentiality that surprises us each time. Transition, transformation, transcendence. 

Speaking about Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) I was seeing a problem to work with. I will call it neither a precolonial, nor colonial, nor postcolonial context. In this work, I am trying to pick up some footraces of the past that we are all embedded in, just as we are all implicated in what’s happening now. Sometimes I say it’s our duty for people from countries like ours to teach their governments. We have to teach them how to be involved in solving our problems because in the end, it’s about us all rather than passing blame—

BN: Sorry for interrupting, but just as an interjection or addition to what you just said . . . Paulo Freire writes in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed that in the process of dehumanizing others, the oppressor also dehumanizes himself. He goes ahead to say that the task of the oppressed is not only to free himself from oppression but also to free the oppressor from this.1

HK: It’s all about stories, and stories are true as long as we don’t get stuck in them. We are in a moment when we have to release each other from the stories in which we got stuck. That is the best way of teaching your “oppressor” how to release himself from that pain. As you know, I am mainly a storyteller, and my latest project is to sell my stories—not for money, but for tears. The viewers and listeners have to cry and I’ll collect their tears. My burden is that I have a story to tell. Shunyamurti says that love is when you release your lover from his or her story without making a story out of it.

In the Global South, we are going through a drought—the heat is getting tougher, like 58 degrees Celsius last summer in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and there is no water, as Turkey is building these dams that deprive us of water. Consider the millions of immigrants that are going to emigrate to the West because of the current condition, and imagine the rise of the right wing as a result of this immigration. We are indeed in the last stage before experiencing this. But we are also welcoming a new generation of children that are much more aware than our generation, and this gives us so much hope. I don’t try to be positive, I’m double negative because of this. [laughs]

So my concern now is: How can we go beyond just the stories? I think what we need now is unconditional forgiveness, and we also need to teach it.

BN: Unconditional forgiveness.

HK: I know it sounds like a cliché.

BN: No, it doesn’t sound like a cliché. The question is if it’s true or not.

HK: When we speak from the heart, especially lately, I really feel I have to say these things that might not sound very intellectual in an art context, but for me it’s not exclusively about that. We need to go beyond who’s the observer and who’s the observed. We are all responsible and implicated in what’s happening. We need to reconnect to the source from which we emerged. That’s why I was interested in working with these bullets and cannons that have been circulating around the world for centuries.

In the poem I Have Come into this World to See This, Hafiz says, “I have come into this world to see this: / the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height / of their arc of anger / because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound / and it is . . . our beloved’s.”

Doing The Bell Project was tantamount to the possibility of refraining from assigning blame, to go beyond that. In this stage of my life and practice, that is what I am focusing on. In the past three years, after the international recognition as an “Artist” and after the art prizes I received, at a time where I could have ten to twelve people working in my studio, I didn’t do any work but made a U-turn and went back to my country, trying to work more within the communities in Sulaymaniyah. Working the land with animals, trying to heal and be healed by the soil.

Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007-2015, video still. Two channel video installation, SD & HD video, 16:9, color, sound with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist; and KOW, Berlin. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

HK: Beautiful! When I wake up these mornings, instead of art, I think of the soil. The soil and plants were mistreated with pesticides and all sorts of chemicals (that tripled the amount of cancer in the country) during the many years of Americanization of Iraq. For over two years now, I have been trying to heal the soil. I became a kind of nurse after being a partisan for decades. I’m no longer interested in revolutionary speech, I have become a nurse because there’s so much to heal. I see soil as intestines. During my childhood I was given so many antibiotics that I was sick for many years. We shouldn’t forget the geopolitical crises we are facing worldwide, among many other crises, and they all are the outcome of the neoliberal politics that came to Iraq during Paul Bremer’s presidency. I have to deal with the water shortages myself. Turkey and Iran are depriving Iraq of water and using it as a way to suppress Iraq politically.

Meanwhile, I am working on building a portable cinema. We go from one village to another talking about how to treat and care for the soil and how to appreciate old traditional knowledges of dealing with land and the environment. This work of the past few years has also transformed the notion of “me.”

BN: Hiwa, what you just said reminds me of what I read a few days ago by a young Cameroonian agro and social entrepreneur, Roland Fomundam. He studied biology and business management in the US but left and came back home to work in agriculture. He said that a few decades ago, one could plant seeds and they grew into strong plants, and there were not many insects destroying the plants because the plants had self-defense mechanisms. But then we were sold fertilizers that were meant to boost the growth of plants, but ended up weakening them and making them more susceptible to insects and diseases. Basically, we as well as our plants have become dependent on these chemicals. The question is, how does one break that cycle? I think taking care of the soil is part of breaking that cycle. But we must also talk about breaking the cycle that locks one up in the art world. Taking cinema and messages to the people seems to be an effort to break that cycle.

HK: Encountering “the people” is not an easy task either. I meet people who are just, metaphorically speaking, into big, bombastic, and shiny tomatoes, as well as everything else that looks beautiful. They are into order and neatness: grass shouldn’t grow randomly, but rather neat and orderly. Also, I have the feeling that they have been conquered or consumed by the so-called American dream. In Iraq, we have a new kind of grasshopper, which can only be killed using Monsanto’s pesticides. Don’t ask me where this kind of grasshopper comes from.

During the war, the first rocket hit the archive [bank] of seeds, which is the oldest archive in the world. Despite this aggression from outside, there is hardly space for accusation. I think art is stuck in accusation, every art show leaves such a negative impact on you that you feel completely hopeless about doing anything. We are in this situation nowadays where we need to work organically. I know I am sounding kind of spiritual, but . . . Again, I know the word “love,” just like “freedom,” has been so misused, and so I’m worried to use it, but what goes to the heart is the most important. The point is, when we are out there meeting with people and working together on the soil and the trees, we learn from the trees and the land. When you look at how slowly trees grow, you start to slow down with them. I might have digressed, but I think that’s what we actually need right now. Humankind is the only species who can live in a way that is opposite to its own nature.

BN: I think you are still very much within the frame, but I want us to make a shift toward transcendence as another thread that goes through these videos of yours. There’s the moment where you talk about your cousin telling you that you lost your father, and he’s expecting you to react in a certain way, and you say, “Well, it’s the first time I ever lost my father.” Or when you’re leaving Kurdistan and your mother tells you, “When you meet death don’t be afraid, it’s just death.” Can you please talk about your articulation of and relationship to transcendence?

HK: It’s a very, very strong question. I will tell you a story. Recently I was with my mom on the farm, but I couldn’t work because of back pain, and she said we must clear the 2,500-square-meter farm. She’s eighty-two. So when I exclaimed that this was too much for her to do she replied, “While the eye is scared, the hand is already working.” [laughter] As you see in View from Above, the eye can go to astronomical lengths, but the hands are short. What my mother said resonated with me. In some way, it is exactly talking about my artistic works, as sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. There is so much uncertainty in the practice, although my hands are working while my eyes are afraid. It’s an attempt to give vision to the hand in order to go astronomical distances.

Do you remember that I showed Pre-Image to no one, as I was really worried to show it at documenta 14? I told Adam Szymczyk that I was not ready to show it. But you were the first person to watch it, and when I showed it to you at the hotel you liked it, and I said, “Oh, God, now, thank God, now I can show it.”

BN: I was so moved by it.

HK: Yes, but also the way you talked about it. I don’t know, those gifts transform you, transcending into another frequency.

BN: I want us to talk about music as a medium of contentment. You are very close to the guitar, even when the instrument is not around. I often see your fingers moving when I talk to you, Hiwa. Your fingers are constantly playing the guitar even without the guitar.

HK: All the time, yes.

Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007-2015, video still, two channel video installation, SD & HD video, 16:9, color, sound with English subtitles. Courtesy of the artist; and KOW, Berlin. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

BN: As if the instrument was an extension of your body. There’s something about your relationship to sound that is produced or sound that is inhabited in you that also serves as a lubricant to that transcendence. Even if there is no sound in your videos, there is this constant musicality.

HK: True, even with image there is musicality. I never impose music on films. If the music happens inside of the situation, I let it, because the voices and all those things are constant music for me. It’s like a third dimension of painting, or it gives you the illusion of a third dimension, which is like Jesus going back to God.

The last thing before his death that Muhammad told Abubakar to tell people was: “Whoever worshipped Muhammad, then Muhammad is dead, but whoever worshipped Allah, then Allah is alive and shall never die.” Muhammad brings you to this two-dimensionality; he doesn’t let you have this illusion of going to paradise, which doesn’t exist. One has the impression it’s about pigment, it’s about dissolving in the soil in which he dissolves too as each one of us.

The point I am making is not about Christianity or Islam, but about his philosophy. You know what, I think if Muhammad was alive, he would listen to blues or jazz because the first person he asked to cry was Bilal ibn Rabah, who was a slave from Ethiopia. [laughter]

BN: Beautiful. The interesting thing about it is that there are great singers like Salif Keita in Mali today who say they are descendants of Bilal. The griots are still singing from their hearts.

SOUND IS SITUATIONAL AND BEARS A FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH THAT DOESN’T CARE ABOUT WHO IS THE LISTENER AND WHO IS THE PLAYER. IT GOES BEYOND THAT BECAUSE SOUND ALWAYS REMINDS US THAT SOMETHING SEPARATES US FROM EACH OTHER. SOUND ALSO BRINGS US THIS KIND OF WEIGHT—SOUND IS VERY VULNERABLE, BUT MUCH STRONGER THAN CONCRETE.

HK: Sound is situational and bears a fundamental truth that doesn’t care about who is the listener and who is the player. It goes beyond that because sound always reminds us that something separates us from each other. Sound also brings us this kind of weight—sound is very vulnerable, but much stronger than concrete.

Before the rehearsals of the Chicago Boys project (2010–ongoing, which is a revival band and study group around free market economy), I invited the whole group to weigh ourselves on a big scale with the aim of knowing how many kilograms we are all together. It’s about being together and sweating together.

BN: I woke up this morning and I remembered a song that I sang in my childhood, and I sang it for the first time to my children. It was powerful.

HK: Why this morning?

BN: I am not sure. It just came and I sang to my children. And while doing so, I wondered why is there such an incredible feeling? Indeed it was stronger than concrete. There’s another song that we sang as children with the lyrics “All things on earth shall live ever to die, but music alone shall live never to die.”

HK: So beautiful. Can you sing it? [laugh] Brother, can you sing? It’s so beautiful!

BN: [Sings]

HK: In his poem “Give Me the Flute,” Gibran Kahlil Gibran says: “Give me the flute, and sing, / Singing is the secret of eternity, / Only mourning of the flute remains, / When everything vanishes.”

Yesterday, I saw a musician eating a watermelon and I really liked it. Though shy, I asked him for a piece and he shared it with me. He ate the red part and stopped at the green. But I ate on deeper into the green and it tasted different—more sour, and drier. Then I asked the musician, “Do you know this taste?” Then I said, “I see new music, where do you give up? Maybe you play with major and minor, but one can go deeper, go to augmented, half-diminished, to diminished and dead-diminished chords. We cannot get there if we don’t eat the green part, the whole way to the skin. I like to go further and don’t be afraid. We’ll all get old and enjoy this too.” I was translating my eating experience into musicality. This too is music—eating this watermelon and not knowing where to stop because, where’s the skin, where’s the bone? We really have to get to the heart. I spent just five minutes with that musician and I wasn’t trying to teach him anything, but explaining something to him with my teeth and tongue and jaw. How new food influences and reconstructs the interior architecture of our mouth, such as new languages do, and sound does the same the ear.

BN: The essence. Beautiful. I would like us to zoom more into the specific works. Let us to start with Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue). For obvious reason, I want us to start with the title. What exactly do mean when you say “blind as the mother tongue”?

HK: Whenever I’m asked this, I have to find a new reason. When I do my work, I jump in with four legs like an animal, and I have to justify it with only two legs. It was a very unique experience being in the container in Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) and not being allowed to move. Why blind? I am trying not to give you a prepared answer. I am really trying to dig a bit more into the watermelon—the deep part. It’s very hard to answer this time. Why blind? If you remember, in the video I am talking in my mother tongue while I am laying in the complete darkness under the heavy truckload from the truck and trying not to make any movement in order not to be noticed by the guards. That moment was the ultimate limitation for my body as well as for my ego. Especially when the guard came standing on the load above me to check whether there was someone hiding there. In the video, I could describe that moment only in my mother tongue. In one of the sentences, I revolt against vision as the final touch from God. We reproduce images just to suspend the real. To avoid that, you need to go before the moment when the image has been fixed. Taking “gaze” by surprise.

Hiwa K, View From Above, 2017, video still. Single channel HD video. Courtesy of the artist; and KOW, Berlin. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

BN: My friend, Raphael Chikukwa, who is the director of the National Gallery in Zimbabwe, spoke in a conference, and was advocating for us to speak our own languages, our mother tongues. He asked: “In what language do you cry?” It reminded me of Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue). “In what language do you cry?” To me that question means, “What is the language from within?” That to me is what I understood from Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue). Again, I’m asking this question because the whole film, to me, is poetry. I don’t know what else I can call it. Of course, like love, poetry has also been used and misused, but I still believe in the truth of poetry. So I want you to talk about the notion of fragmentation in language because in the film you take us into that world and experience. Like a storyteller, you are telling us a story from multiple perspectives—fragments.

HK: Yes, true.

BN: Or one could also say multiplicity, the various ways of experiencing a situation. Like when you say, “Oh, this path seems familiar to me because I’ve walked on it before.”

HK: In the aforementioned work, I say I have been here before . . . maybe centuries ago. Through those mirrors I am trying to trace my footsteps that I took centuries ago. Meaning by that, all traces and fingerprints of our culture upon the Western world.

Just to add one thing about the question on mother tongue and the title: my difficulty in answering this could also be the answer, because the title teases you to dig as I myself am digging—and sometimes I don’t find anything meaningful. It is like the experience of the Kurds in Turkey, who are not allowed to speak their language: “How can I love in a language that you forced me to learn?” My mother tongue is so important, and I wouldn’t call it language. Language is something you learn. So that’s not language. As I said, you hear it when you are in your mother’s womb; you hear all these sounds and these verses. You learn it before you get to open your eyes. It comes before vision. So, again, why blind? It’s the opposite of  “let there be light,” from above. No, it’s “let there be darkness,” from the inside.

Now to the question of fragmentation. Where I come from, sometimes you ask an old person, “How old are you?” And they answer, “I don’t know, somewhere between eighty and seventy.” That was the culture before Americanization. People used to see things as whole. Now people are obsessed with centimeters and millimeters. Fragmentation happens when you don’t have this and you come to encounter something that is so structured, which is the way the West presented itself—as the most structured, much stronger, and having the best medium for everything. So, in Pre-Image I am describing a culture that hasn’t participated in the notion of Ich and has been looted and had its parts spread in different places. The mirrors are tracing those scattered parts.

Another thing that I find very challenging is the question of identity. What’s in an identity when you look in the mirror and see another image, not yourself? It’s about daring to be someone else. To see another image and dare to look different (a non-selfie). In the film, it is also about the negotiation between the way I want to go and the mood of the object, which always wants to go somewhere else. That is why I adapt. There is also a grammar that I have to keep, which is the grammar of balancing. The object shouldn’t fall. It’s the attempt of a non-centered entity that pretends to be a centered white man. Borrowing his vision from above.

And then you could also ask, why “pre-image” rather than “image”? That’s when you don’t have the luxury of gazing at something. It’s quite a privilege to gaze at someone, and as soon as you gaze, your ego starts to make an image, which is fixed, pinned down, and then you can conquer it. But I don’t have that luxury because I’m busy with balancing, to guarantee my next step.

AND THEN YOU COULD ALSO ASK, WHY “PRE-IMAGE” RATHER THAN “IMAGE”? THAT’S WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE THE LUXURY OF GAZING AT SOMETHING. IT’S QUITE A PRIVILEGE TO GAZE AT SOMEONE, AND AS SOON AS YOU GAZE, YOUR EGO STARTS TO MAKE AN IMAGE, WHICH IS FIXED, PINNED DOWN, AND THEN YOU CAN CONQUER IT. BUT I DON’T HAVE THAT LUXURY BECAUSE I’M BUSY WITH BALANCING, TO GUARANTEE MY NEXT STEP.

BN: When you mentioned earlier about not being able to say “I love you” in Kurdish, it reminded me of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote in Decolonizing the Mind.2 He said that when he was in school he couldn’t speak his mother tongue. The colonial school system didn’t permit that. He started writing in his mother tongue to avoid writing in English because of that, and that is part of the process of decolonizing one’s mind.

I would like for you to unpack that notion of the “pre-image” a bit more and talk more about this balance. There’s a beautiful part in the film in which you say, “My upper body is enslaving my lower part.” I obviously thought of balance then. What is that when the upper body enslaves the lower part? If your upper part cannot be carried by your lower because it’s enslaving the lower part, then there’s no balance.

Hiwa K, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), 2017, video still. Single channel HD video. Courtesy of the artist; KOW, Berlin; and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani, Milan-Lucca. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

HK: First of all, it was about a physical burden, because the character/myself was working very hard. The character was working in a factory in a basement in Turkey for fourteen hours a day to earn $100 a month. During the breaks, I would make drawings, paintings—a legacy of the fourteen years of self-studying abstract paintings in particular, and Western art in general in Iraq. You know, sometimes, when you have a meaningful encounter, you cannot just take a cab. You have to walk, or you go on your knees, or you have to crawl in a sacred way because that which awaits you is so important. For Pre-Image, it was very important for me to carry all these images and burdens on my nose. To me, it’s the burden of art history from my perspective, which is that of an artist who’s defeated. I was replicating the Western art tradition for about fourteen years of my artistic life. I was literally carrying them in my backpack when I was walking toward Europe. So it was an important encounter with the West, questioning why I am deprived from my own art? Why am I repeating you? What happened that I lost track of my footsteps? 

For many centuries, the Westerners thought that non-Westerners couldn’t see well, that’s why they used such strong colors. They thought non-Westerners couldn’t hear well, and that they were physically disabled, that’s why their colors are so screamingly shining. This is what I mean by the fact that the upper part is enslaving the lower part. If you watch the video View from Above, it’s the same thing. The judge is looking from above and is in charge of deciding the fate of the person who is in the lower part, according to his data [a map] that don’t match the reality . . . but we will come to this later. It reminds me of this Moroccan philosopher who once said that ears are always connected to the heart, and eyes connected to the brain. This sounds true to me. I don’t know if I ever told you the story my mom told me about heritage?

BN: Please, tell me again.

HK: An older brother wants to fool his younger brother because their father died and he wants to get everything from the estate. He says, “Listen, my little brother, from the floor to the roof belongs to me, and from the roof to the sky belongs to you.” He actually gives him everything! The whole universe. It might sound romantic, but this is reflected in my artworks too.

BN: To me, View from Above is one of your most important works. The politics of it, its questioning of maps, the way cartography became such an incredible colonizing tool, and is still a violent tool. I watched the video with my students, and we noticed how the judge was playing God. But I would like you to talk about the notion of the safe zone—that fictitious place in the mind of European bureaucrats.

HK: This is about the luxury of gazing, which some bureaucrats have, especially in the context of immigration. They are never in touch with reality. The only thing they do is put it on the map—determine where in the world is safe and where is unsafe. Unfortunately, in what they call “safe zones,” there is unsafety. For the West, it’s black and white. They trace this “safety” line that goes from North to South, and if you live one village behind that, they can send you back. Even if you live just 200 meters away from the Iraqi army, where you could be caught or attacked within seconds—but the map doesn’t know that. Just like the system, it doesn’t see. It’s blind. It oversees. That’s why I say that the judge is a narcissist and that you have to climb from behind when everyone is asleep.

What the character in the video does is pretend that he comes from another city that is “unsafe” according to the UN. Then, using the strategy of the judge, he learns how to situate himself in that city by studying the map and talking to people from that city. And when the character is interrogated by the judge and responds from the perspective of the judge, the judge exclaims: “Finally, I found someone who is true. Someone who sees from my perspective.” So in the end, it is only the liar who gets asylum. All the people who are coming from those unsafe zones cannot describe their city from the perspective of the judge, and cannot prove that they are from those cities.

BN: I think the crux of this whole film is about making the unsafe zone safe while still unsafe. Someone seeking refuge needs to convince the European bureaucrat that the “safe zone” of his mind, his imaginary “safe zone,” is actually an unsafe zone.

HK: Yes, exactly, because these zones are not safe. It’s just a fiction. People like us cannot go there. And you cannot determine safety by looking at maps. They send people seeking refuge in Europe back to Iraq and they get killed. The character in the film spent five years in a deportation center with the fear of being sent back to a so-called safe zone. But where is the safety? The perspective of the person looking from above has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. His power is in his eyes.

BN: One thing I was thinking, Hiwa, is that there’s a conflict there, a conflict between mono-visuality and pluri-visuality. The judge can only see mono-visually. It takes me back to Pre-Image where you are looking at the world through the reflections of all those mirrors. That is pluri-visuality. The judge can’t do that.

There is a lot of “mono-” in Western cultures—monogamy, monotheism, monopoly. The problem we’re facing is that with colonialism, this mono-visuality and other monocultures have been imposed on us. I think with your artistic practice, you are questioning these “monos.” I wanted to ask you about your choice of the form of storytelling . . .

HK: Yes, and now fighting a monoculture that has been exported to our country, which has practiced permaculture for thousands of years. 

Going back to the pluri-me, one of the survival strategies for asylum seekers is the elasticity of their story. You have to be unfaithful to your own photo album, your own biography. That enables you create a space, a third dimension around the linear Western bureaucracy. Also, by crossing borders illegally you have to find new strategies in order to overcome the pitfalls that have been set by the bureaucrats.

Hiwa K, View From Above, 2017, video still. Single channel HD video. Courtesy of the artist; and KOW, Berlin. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection.

BN: In the beginning, we talked about transformation, transition, transcendence. I have heard of people who came to Europe to seek asylum and they had to become another person. They have to become the story they tell to make the European bureaucrat understand that they are unsafe. That is transformation. The question is who was that person that you left? What is the relationship between that new person and that old person in moments of extreme difficulty and precarity?

HK: When you create a new person, a new name, age, even fingerprints (don’t ask me how), then you live with that person for fifteen years, you become it. The moment you officially claim and regain your “real” name again, you start to feel a huge gap in your life. You start to miss that “me.” That leads you to a question, “If I can change my story so easily, what is real about it?” You realize that there was no story in the first place. You have to experience it. [laughs]

BN: Yes. And even in the most difficult moments you always have a joke to tell.

HK: I love jokes because it is the only real thing. One of my spiritual teachers said once: “Comedy is the highest mode of literature because you start laughing about the stupidity of our species for all the tragedy and drama they are making.”

BN: I want us to talk about spirituality because, knowing you for many years now, although you don’t call on any gods I know you are a deeply spiritual person. That is the way I perceive you. I think of the church bells you worked with. They give me goosebumps. They call you in. I wanted us to use this sound of the bell to introduce the idea of spirituality behind The Bell Project.

HK: I don’t consider myself a spiritual person. I have an atheist Marxist background, but recently I slipped into un-atheism as the outcome of being helpless to make a change or realizing that art in general is unable to transform. Instead, I am letting the soil teach me. We have to realize that we as a species (and other species as well) are on the edge of extinction and there is no time left. What was sold to us as reality has to be stripped from illusion. So art should transform in this very moment of disaster.

For me, when the bell sounds, it opens a space and allows you to take a break from just being you. Sound is fundamental to me. When you hear certain sounds, you forget for a while this pain deep within you and your ego. Especially a sound that comes from a bell that cost thousands of lives for nothing. 

Sound invites us all to listen and to be here. Sound is about vibration. That’s why I spent so much time finding the exact percentage, 79 percent copper and 21 percent tin, in their cleanest composition, 99 percent. It was in order to achieve the right sound. It is also question of vertical sound versus horizontal sound. And, somehow, through the melting process, one achieves horizontality. I am also interested in the urgency of the tones. When I play music, there is an urgency. It is like breathing. We need to keep breathing, breathing together.

BN: There is also a process of reconnection going on in the piece—for example, connecting the histories of the Middle East with the histories of Europe through the bell. It seems to me there is also a healing or a reconciliation going on.

HK: We do have to heal, and there is much to heal. But we can’t heal without knowing. In my country, we will be soon have temperatures of about 60 to 65 degrees Celsius, which will make it a dead zone. How can we correct this? Enduring pain, enduring heat, enduring many vicious practices and conditions, but what are the solutions? First, we need to do something meaningful. Like Rumi says, if you go and sit in a hole and ask what you can do, you will only see the sky as very narrow. But if you come out of the hole, you will see how big the sky is.

BN: I think the work you are doing has agency. The work has its own direction and mission. The artist can only do so much, then the artwork takes over.

HK: The artist is the midwife. Often you see artworks speaking about postcolonialism, but the approach to materials, to the situation, and to the people who are engaged in it is colonial. We have to be very careful and let the materials speak. We must allow for the situations to speak, and for other people to speak. As I said earlier, artists are like midwives, and they are just facilitating ideas to be birthed from the pregnant world.

BN: What would you say is the role of translation in your work?

HK: There are several processes of translation in my work. For example, in Cooking with Mama (2015–ongoing), the organic food from a physical space is translated into the digital space and becomes another organic body entirely. Translation by means of transformation. Also in The Bell Project, or in View from Above when K becomes M for fifteen years and then becomes someone who is beyond both. The same as when Islam translated Greek philosophy and gave it back to Europe.

BN: Thank you so much.

HK: Thank you so much.