Hiwa K, Cooking with Mama, 2021, in the context of the exhibition Politics of Love at Kunsthaus Hamburg 2024, Photo: Lucas Betz
Sun, 2.2.2025, 5 pm
Cooking with Mama
Performance by Hiwa K with Amna Elhassan & Lulu MacDonald
at Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Please put on warm clothes. The event will take place outside.
Free participation
Please register in advance until 27.1. via mail to register@kunsthaushamburg.de!
Hiwa K’s art is explicitly aimed at generating a broad social response and thereby bringing about real change. For his performance series Cooking with Mama, the artist invites people with a history of migration to call good friends and relatives and to cook their favourite dishes in front of an audience and then share a meal together. To this end, he has developed a street kitchen bike inspired by food stands in Iraq and Syria. The shared culinary experience creates encounters capable of prompting dialogue and, by sharing the recipes, extending beyond the performance period itself. In the context of the exhibition project Politics of Love, Hiwa K’s mobile kitchen will travel to three public cultural venues in different parts of Hamburg over the course of the exhibition, where it will be used to engage with the local communities, thus expanding the exhibition into the urban space.
The last of the three performances will take place in the immediate neighbourhood of the Kunsthaus: This time, البليلةالمسبعة (Al Musaba’a) will be cooked for the audience on the square outside the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The bean stew will be prepared by the artists Amna Elhassan and Lulu MacDonald, who will be instructed by Amna Elhassan’s mother via video call. During the cooking process, they talk about the practice of food sharing as a community-building and defence practice in Sudan as well as the cultural and personal stories of the dish, which is also popular in a different form in Jersey, Lulu MacDonald’s birthplace. The works of both artists are currently on view in Politics of Love.
The project is kindly supported by the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS as part of the #seeyouagain initiative.