The “symbiotic embrace” between educational institutions and prison systems is widely seen as the cornerstone of the modern prison state. In a new three-channel video, Like a good, good, good boy, 2023, Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K expands this dyad to include home, returning to Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan region of Iraq to physically tie a 1,500 meter rope from his childhood home to the school where he studied and at the notorious Amna Suraka prison. In the captivating central projection, drone footage follows the rope as it traverses expanses of cityscape. On one of the accompanying screens, an older passerby, moved by the curious intervention, recounts the horrific crimes committed in Amna Suraka by Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime from 1979 to 1991 and the incessant screams that filled the neighborhood.
Much like a surgeon cutting through skin to reach deeper damaged tissue, Hiwa K creates the conditions for a diverse group of local Kurds to reflect on the violence that followed the Baath coup in 1968. Their stories, among which examples of former prison guards employed as teachers – paint a picture of cultural oppression carried out through educational policy, with an emphasis on the suppression of the Kurdish language in favor first of Arabic and now English. The second video shows the artist walking through classrooms, recalling when, at the age of five, without any prior knowledge of the language, he was enrolled in an Arabic school. This memory of linguistic disorientation finds expression in the set of five backlit collages Ball Ballat Babel2023, which combine scans of Arabic textbooks filtered through colored shapes (a visual effect taken from the artist’s previous work My Father’s Color Periods, 2014-). Both nuanced and emotional, Hiwa K’s contemplative self-narrative approach leaves a lasting imprint, a vital archetype for resisting amnesia in this age of information overload.
