One of five new films from Art21’s winter 2020 programming

Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K discusses his desire to make artwork that is understandable to a wide audience. Describing his video and sculpture installation, “The Bell Project” (2007–2015), the artist explains how he spent years following and filming a Kurdish scrap yard owner named Nazhad, who collected the U.S. and European military waste that was sold to and used in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. Melted down into bricks of raw metal, these weapons of war took on new life and became, as the artist states, “possibilities of transformation.”

Inspired by the fact that church bells were often melted down to make cannons during times of war in pre-industrial Europe, Hiwa K explains how he became interested in swapping this process by making a bell out of melted down weapons. The artist had Nazhad’s metal bricks sent to Italy, where a foundry cast the material into a large bell, adorned with Assyrian imagery. The bell, installed at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York alongside the artist’s videos of Nazhad’s scrap yard and the Italian foundry, becomes a simple but potent depiction of the circulation of materials and how countries are linked through warfare. Expressing his own difficulty with the art often exhibited in museums and his intention to make his work intelligible to all viewers, Hiwa K states, “I have an affair with knowledge, I don’t have a relationship with knowledge. I don’t want to overdose my work with philosophy.”