Art As Resistance, Artist As Smuggler: In Conversation With Hector Prize Winner, Hiwa K

“With this exhibition Hiwa K is on the frontier to something new, challenging the institutional ways of art education”, Baden points out. For Hiwa K, it seems to be something more: “we are entering a new era, we are drowning now”, he says. As temperatures around the world soar, his practice has had to shift—a direct response to climate change, migration and the social and political consequences—namely, the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe—that this increasing heat has engendered. For Hiwa K, words are no longer enough. “First you have to try to change things with your hands, if that does not work you have to use words. Finally, if nothing else works, you just have to go to the heart. We all understand music, vibrations, silence, breathing. I am not esoteric, but I have no other instruments.” Interweaving art with its audience, fact with fiction, and history with the personal, one thing is for sure: Hiwa K’s art is terrifically real.