Hiwa K: PIN-DOWN

PIN-DOWN marks the start of De Appel’s collaboration with the Berlin-based artist Hiwa K and is the result of a unique partnership with El Otmani Gym, a renowned fight club in Amsterdam Nieuw-West.

PIN-DOWN is an intellectual wrestling game between Hiwa K and Bakir Ali, an Iraqi-Kurdish existential philosopher currently working as a taxi driver in Berlin. Over the past years the artist and the philosopher have had wide-ranging poetic and philosophical conversations, which were organised in intimate settings. Together they discussed the Kurdish question, ideas of non-belonging, horizontalism and an unfixed understanding of the world. Recently, however, these encounters have shifted towards intense yet amateurish wrestling-sessions, in which the movement of bodies acts as a memory tool. For PIN-DOWN, Hiwa K for the first time challenges Bakir Ali to stage such a battle in a public setting.

*To make a reservation please email to info [​at​] deappel.nl Through his work, Hiwa K (Kurdistan-Iraq, 1975) rejects normative aesthetic definitions by exploring alternative artistic possibilities that engage oral histories, social confrontations and politically charged situations. His projects are shown at Documenta 14, the 56th Venice Biennale and Manifesta 7, and at renowned art institutions such as the New Museum, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and M HKA, Antwerp.

PIN-DOWN is part of the exhibition To remember, sometimes you need different archeological tools, which opens 7 October 2017 at De Appel.