Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (2017)

‘To remember, sometimes you need other archaeological tools,’ says the voice over in Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue). The video depicts the artist walking across fields, wastelands, estates, going from Turkey to Athens and then to Rome, a path that mirrors his own journey as a child, when he fled Iraqi Kurdistan and reached Europe by foot. His “Pre-images” are fragments of a path whose final destination is uncertain. Commissioned by Documenta 14.