Cooking with Mama

Hiwa K

Hiwa K, Cooking with Mama, in the context of the exhibition Politics of Love, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2024/25

Hiwa K, Cooking with Mama, in the context of the exhibition Politics of Love, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2024/25, Photo: Lucas Betz

At the centre of Hiwa K’s (*1975, Sulaymaniyah, IQ-KR) artistic work are the everyday practices of encounter, storytelling and political action. His art is explicitly aimed at generating a broad social response and thereby bringing about real change. The performance Cooking with Mama illustrates this approach. 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.

For Politics of Love, this 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.

This community-oriented performance was initiated by a workshop held in the foyer of the Kunsthaus Hamburg on 31 October 2024 as part of the #seeforfree event, encouraging visitors to share their own family recipes for a collective cookbook which now can also be viewed in the foyer of the Kunsthaus or online.

The first Cooking with Mama event in Hamburg will take place at the HyCP – Hyper Cultural Passengers project space on the Veddel on 7 December 2024. For this, Alima Ouedraogo from the Boudyelee association, which supports children and young people in Burkina Faso, will be cooking with the support of HyCP member Michael Kress. On 11 January 2025, the bike will move on towards Hein-Köllisch-Platz to the Galerie Gemüse at Obst und Gemüse der Saison. Here, the bike will be put into operation by the city curator Joanna Warsza together with the artistic director of the Kunsthaus Hamburg Anna Nowak. The activating events will culminate on 2 February 2025 in a finissage held on the forecourt of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in the immediate vicinity of the Kunsthaus. Here, artist Amna Elhassan – whose work in the exhibition deals with food sharing as a community-building and defence practice in Sudan – will prepare a dish together with the Hamburg-based artist Lulu MacDonald.

Of vital importance is the concept of networking – not only with other cultural workers and institutions but above all with their immediate social environment. Preparing meals is an activity that comes across as simple and commonplace. It is something that affects virtually all humans. At the same time, it opens up a wide field charged with multi-layered meanings and values that lend themselves to discussion. Certain recipes in particular inspire us to relate and reminisce: countless stories seem to emerge along with questions regarding families, origins and all kinds of kinship. Shared culinary experiences create encounters capable of prompting dialogue and, by sharing the recipes, extending beyond the performance period itself.

The project is supported by the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS as part of the #seeyouagain initiative.