Contemporary art is an intellectual field that enables different historical temporalities, incompletely articulated forms of knowledge, and contradictory experiences to encounter one another on a shared plane. Contemporaneity points to a temporal plurality in which the past, the present, and unfinished histories seep into one another. Rather than representing this plurality, the artwork reveals its tensions.
While framing this personal account as a narrative of healing, the work transforms it into a multilayered conceptual space that exposes the tensions among exile, the body, war, healing, and modern science. The video brings folk knowledge and advanced technology, everyday life and the experience of war, as well as poetic narrative and political reality into the same discursive field. Healers, migrant workers, oral culture, and bodily memory appear alongside drone technologies, surveillance systems, and medical imaging devices. Yet no hierarchy or reconciliation is established between these elements. The work places different forms of knowledge in confrontation with one another without offering a singular explanatory framework through which they can be resolved.
This encounter focuses particularly on the body and regimes of vision. The technical gaze of ultrasound and the healer’s intuitive knowledge, the clinical precision of medical discourse and the oral rhythms of Kurdish, the drone’s aerial perspective and a cosmological imagination directed toward the stars all coexist within the same space. In doing so, the video suggests that truth in the contemporary world can no longer be produced from a single center but is instead distributed across different regimes of vision operating at multiple scales. The context of post-war Iraq provides the historical framework for this dispersed field. The phrase “after the fall of the dictator” signals a threshold moment in which institutions, systems of knowledge, and modes of reading the body are reconfigured. At this threshold, healing, medicine, technology, and folk knowledge are collectively redefined. The video does not seek to resolve this plurality; rather, it sustains it as a productive tension. Instead of positioning the viewer within a single regime of truth, it leaves them suspended between forms of knowledge that neither exclude nor reduce one another. The intellectual force of the work emerges precisely from this state of suspension.
You Will Feel Nothing, 2025, Still from single-channel video
The astronaut in the opening sequence of the video establishes the first point at which the metaphor begins to fracture. A powerful parallel emerges between the energy required to escape the Earth's gravitational field and the experience of fleeing exile. Here, exile exceeds the condition of physical displacement and becomes a form of gravitational rupture. The Earth operates as an invisible field of attraction that continuously calls the subject back. Yet return is no less fragile than departure. The atmosphere can only be entered at a certain angle: if the descent is too steep, one burns up; if it is too shallow, one is thrust back into space. The astronaut’s re-entry and the exile’s return to the homeland are thus conceived within the same ontological uncertainty. Homecoming never returns one to the point of departure. The geography to which one returns has changed, and the returning body is no longer the same body.
This rupture first becomes visible on the body itself. The kidney stone ceases to be merely a medical condition and becomes a sedimented manifestation of exile, war, and historical burden within the body. The clinical language of hospital reports describes the stone’s size, location, and movement through a precise technical vocabulary. Terms such as “8 mm stone,” “left ureter,” and “cyst” belong to the characteristic lexicon of modern biopolitical knowledge. The body is constituted as a surface that can be measured, read, and archived. Ultrasound is among the most visible instruments of this regime of vision: it renders the invisible visible, transforming the body into an image and the image into data. At precisely this moment, the video introduces another regime of vision. Haji Laser stands in contrast to the technical certainty of modern medicine. Yet this encounter cannot be understood as a simple opposition between science and superstition. The claim that the healer can see inside the body through beams of light emanating from his eyes initially appears irrational or fantastical. However, the work neither elevates this claim into a romantic truth nor neutralizes it through ironic distance. Instead, it leaves open the possibility that other modes of perception, excluded from modern epistemology, may still remain in circulation. It is precisely here that the tension intensifies. Both the ultrasound and the healer look inside the body: one through technological apparatuses, the other through embodied intuition and touch. The work privileges neither regime of vision over the other. The hospital identifies the presence of the stone; the healer declares that it has disappeared. The viewer is not asked to choose between them. Rather, Hiwa K interrogates how truth is produced, which regimes of vision authorize it, and how different forms of knowledge continue to coexist within the contemporary world.
This inquiry, which begins within the body, gradually expands toward the sky. Although the scale shifts, the central question remains the same: who is looking, from where, and into what form of knowledge is that act of seeing translated? The ultrasound scans the depths of the body; the drone surveys the earth from above; the astronaut observes the Earth from the outside; the healer attempts to see beyond the skin; and the elderly shepherd woman follows the stars. By bringing these different modes of vision into a shared narrative, Hiwa K underscores that seeing is never neutral. The sky therefore becomes more than a landscape; it unfolds as a space in which meanings are constantly displaced. At first, the stars function as markers of orientation, memory, and cosmological belonging. For the shepherd, the sky forms part of lived experience, oral culture, and knowledge transmitted across generations. As the video progresses, however, those same stars are translated into a different language. They no longer provide direction; they generate coordinates. The phrase “geometries disguised as stars” becomes the poetic articulation of this transformation. The sky ceases to be a shared horizon carrying the rhythms of life and becomes an abstract surface upon which military calculations are performed. Thus, although the shepherd woman’s gaze and the drone’s gaze meet within the same sky, they do not belong to the same world. One seeks orientation; the other identifies a target. The difference lies in the fundamentally altered relationship each maintains with the world. It is here that war acquires a different significance. Destruction no longer targets only cities and bodies; it also reshapes the scale, distance, and sensibility of vision itself. The drone’s gaze detaches life from its social context, reducing it to a target that can be identified from afar. Hiwa K does not communicate this condition through direct images of war. Instead, he renders visible the gradual cooling of vision, its loss of contact, and its transformation into geometric calculation. As a result, even though the sniper and the stargazer look toward the same sky, they no longer inhabit the same universe.
One of the most striking aspects of the work is the way it continually disperses dense political concerns into the texture of everyday gestures. The healer’s humorous manner of speaking, the village bus, time spent on the farm, the sound of a shovel striking the earth, or the rhythm of the soil itself all translate large historical and political questions into the scale of daily life. In this way, the video avoids a didactic mode of address. Truth is not established through theoretical explanation or academic discourse; rather, it circulates through encounters, sounds, and ordinary actions. Within these encounters, sound is as significant as language itself. The phonetic warmth of Kurdish is one of the work’s defining elements. A clear distance emerges between the sterile tone of medical reports read in English and the oral rhythms of Kurdish. English operates as a global language of verification, one that documents, measures, and records. At the same time, it becomes a voice stripped of personal inflection, almost mechanical in its precision. Hospital reports are read aloud; measurements, dates, and numbers are recited with an uninterrupted claim to accuracy. Kurdish, by contrast, pauses, repeats, breathes, jokes, hesitates, and reveals the body residing within the voice. The healer’s reassurance—“don’t be afraid”—or his everyday humor exceeds the limits of propositional meaning and becomes a means of establishing trust through vocal rhythm. The video thus brings two distinct sonic regimes into dialogue. In one, sound produces documentation; in the other, it creates relationships. In one, information is transmitted; in the other, experience is shared. The work therefore constructs a powerful auditory composition in relation to the world around it. Silences, breaths, rhythmic repetitions, and the circular flow of speech cultivate an alternative sense of time that resists the accelerated pace of contemporary life. The tempo of the video is crucial in this regard. Against a world governed by speed and continuous circulation, Hiwa K chooses slowness, waiting, and silence. Healing, too, does not emerge as a sudden miracle; it becomes perceptible through a gradual shift in rhythm.
The phrase “You will feel nothing” occupies the center of this rhythmic structure. At first, it sounds like an ordinary reassurance. As the video unfolds, however, its meaning gradually expands. Nothing is felt when the stone passes. Just as nothing is felt when war approaches. Drone strikes move faster than perception itself. Trauma, meanwhile, becomes so deeply embedded within the body that pain can no longer be experienced directly. In this sense, numbness and desensitization emerge as the consequence of history’s excessive burden weighing upon the senses. Hiwa K does not dramatize suffering; nor does he resort to monumental images of catastrophe or direct representations of violence. Trauma circulates through silence, delay, breath, and the weight of the body. Rather than confronting the viewer with images of pain, he invites them to listen to the resonance that pain leaves behind within the body. In this respect, the work departs significantly from dominant modes of representation in contemporary visual culture that continually expose and spectacularize suffering.
Towards the end of the work, the narrative increasingly opens onto a cosmological plane. Speculations concerning black holes, negative time, stars, and death emerge not as claims to scientific truth but as fragments of an imagination fractured in the aftermath of trauma. The question here is not whether life exists on Mars. Rather, it is how a subject shattered by war and exile can make sense of the world once again. It is at this point that the video constructs a new cosmology, weaving new relationships between sky and earth, body and memory, stars and everyday life. The metaphysical dimension of the work therefore reveals not a withdrawal from the world, but an effort to reconnect with it. Exile is also a separation from the rhythm of the soil, the orienting force of the sky, and the memory of the body. Throughout the video, this rupture is gradually reversed. Soil, stars, body, and sound are brought back into proximity along a shared conceptual horizon. The return to the farm, or the act of working the land, becomes an attempt to re-anchor the body to the earth. Each strike of the shovel against the ground gathers the conceptual layers unfolded throughout the video into a renewed material rhythm. In the end, the work does not arrive at grand theoretical explanations or definitive conclusions. What remains is the sound of the shovel. The resistance of the earth. Breath. Silence. Perhaps the truth that Hiwa K searches for throughout the video emerges precisely here: in that fragile moment when body and earth are once again able to share the same rhythm, prior to their abstraction into concepts.
May 1
The Bell Project
Hiwa K is a contemporary Kurdish artist born in Sulaymaniyah in 1975. He is widely recognized for his multilayered artistic practice addressing exile, post-war memory, body politics, everyday labour, and regimes of perception. Based in Berlin and shaped by his experience of migrating on foot from Iraqi Kurdistan to Europe, the artist works across video, performance, sound, and installation. Through research-driven projects that connect individual memory to broader biopolitical processes, his work is frequently situated within the post-conceptual field of contemporary art.
Hiwa K’s international prominence became particularly visible with The Bell Project, presented at the 56th Venice Biennale. In this work, military metal remnants from the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf Wars were melted down and transformed into a large bell, creating a powerful structure of political memory that recirculates the material and symbolic residues of war. The reliefs on the bell’s surface, which reference Mesopotamian artistic traditions, make visible the tension between destruction and cultural continuity. The work recalls the words of Aram Tigran: “If I were to come into this world once again, I would melt down all the tanks, rifles, and weapons and turn them into saz, cümbüş, and zurna.”
Another important milestone in Hiwa K’s career was documenta 14. Presented as part of documenta 14, under the curatorial framework Learning from Athens, his work Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) explores the fragmented perceptual structure of the exiled subject through the body. Carrying mirrors balanced on his head, the artist reflects the sky onto the ground, reversing the relationship between above and below, body and space. This performative gesture offers a perceptual and spatial articulation of the experience of migration.
Having participated in the Sharjah Biennial, Manifesta 7, the Asian Art Biennial, and numerous international exhibitions, Hiwa K is today regarded as one of the key figures in contemporary debates surrounding migration, memory, biopolitics, technologies of war, and alternative forms of knowledge.
Images reproduced courtesy of the artist’s website: http://www.hiwak.net
info@firezz.com
Yorumlar (0)