Hiwa K

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 traveled to three public cultural venues in different parts of Hamburg over the course of the exhibition, where it was used to engage with the local communities, thus expanding the exhibition into the urban space.

The first Cooking with Mama event in Hamburg took place at the HyCP – Hyper Cultural Passengers project space on the Veddel (Sieldeich 36, 20539 Hamburg), where Alima Ouedraogo from the Boudyelee association, which supports children and young people in Burkina Faso, cooked Tigaidigaina – chicken and vegetables in a peanut butter sauce with rice – as well as a vegetarian version of the dish with the support of HyCP member Michael Kress.

The second Cooking with Mama event in Hamburg took place in front of Galerie Gemüse at Hein-Köllisch-Platz, where the City Curator Joanna Warsza cooked together with the Artistic Director of the Kunsthaus Hamburg Anna Nowak. Instructed by the artist Alevtina Kakhidze, who called in via video from Ukraine, they prepared Borschtsch while talking about the history and political implications of this traditional dish, which is widespread in many parts of Eastern Europe.

The last of the three performances took place in the immediate neighbourhood of the Kunsthaus where البليلةالمسبعة (Al Musaba’a) was cooked for the audience on the square outside the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The bean stew was prepared by the artists Amna Elhassan and Lulu MacDonald, who were instructed by Amna Elhassan’s mother via video call. During the cooking process, they talked 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 were on view in Politics of Love.