The curious mind of Hiwa K

The Kurdish artist discusses some of the highlights from his current exhibition in Dubai

When the Kurdish artist Hiwa K was a child in Baghdad, his mother noticed how he would crawl to a small canal near their home and pick up random items. Even their neighbor recognized his peculiar behavior. “He told my mother, ‘I don’t know what

this guy will be, but he is very interested — he’s too curious,’” Hiwa, now based in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, tells Arab News. “She always said that was the beginning of my artistic practice.”

That childlike sense of curiosity seems to have remained with him, as evidenced by his latest exhibition — “Do you remember what you are burning?” — at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre, his first in the region. Old TV screens, scraps of raw material, and experimental video installations ultimately act as a self-portrait, reflecting Hiwa’s personal experience of warfare and estrangement as a refugee during the 1990s. In a statement for the exhibition, he writes:

“People often ask me, ‘Where are you based?’ ‘On my feet.’ ‘Where are your feet based?’ ‘My feet are never based.’”

The exhibition also serves as a commentary on Iraq in recent decades, in which it has been tossed from one political conflict to another, from the Iran-Iraq war to the rise of Daesh.

The show gathers work from across the past 13 years of his career, which he says has been touched by both “beautiful times and difficulties.”

He adds: “I’m in a different stage in my life now. We are living in a very crucial moment. Globally we are on the edge of extinction now and we have to be even more direct. It’s time.”

Here, Hiwa walks us through a selection of works from the exhibition, which runs until July 24.

We are living in a very crucial moment. We are on the edge of extinction now. We have to be even more direct. It’s time.