Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
In This Lemon Tastes of Apple, my work presented at the 21st Biennial, we are taken to the interior of a demonstration in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, in 2011. I don't see it as a video about the protest, but as the protest itself. I even can’t call it an art piece, because you don’t think of making a video piece in a situation that you could be in pieces.
On that day the militias started to shoot at us with tear gas and bullets, from which ten people died and almost 500 got injured during the protest, which was about to end due to that violence that reached its peak on that day, and someone had to give it another push to revive it (even though it looked a bit heroic). I borrowed a guitar and two megaphones from the music shop and asked my friend Daroon to play and got my harmonica, and then we started to do so while walking towards the militias. We didn't even set a camera, because we knew we were being filmed from everywhere. Actually, one of the cameramen is Kamaran Najim, who gave us much of the material you see on the video. He was kidnapped by ISIS in 2015 and we haven't heard from him since.
We know that the title of the work plays an important role here. In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s army promoted a genocide of the Kurdish people, killing thousands using chemical weapons, in what became known as the Halabja massacre. The inhaled gas had, according to the survivors, an apple-like smell. The smell, since then, has a strong association with the political memory of the country. The lemon was also used in the demonstrations of 2011 to relieve the impact of the tear gas. Using the reference of these two smells—something at the same time ethereal and delicate—to connect these two brutal events, seems to me a new way to approach these acts of resistance to power.
In This Lemon... I am also trying to refer to two forms of totalitarianism: one in the time of Saddam Hussein, which was the classical model, like in the 1930s, when one person is in charge of the totality of the country; and the new model of totalitarianism, in which the market is in charge. If we learn from Naomi Klein that the Iraq War was a neoliberal project to force the country to privatize all its public assets and letting different foreign investors, such as Monsanto, come to Iraq, among other projects, we see that they succeeded in Northern Iraq. This demonstration was against that.