Hiwa K

This Lemon Tastes of Apples

The video This Lemon Tastes Of Apple by Hiwa K documents an intervention undertaken by the artist during the protests that took place in 2011 in his hometown of Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The performance took place on the last day of a period of legal demonstrations, which were subsequently prohibited. In the video the artist participates in the violent demonstration while playing a famous theme song by Ennio Morricone from the movie Once Upon a Time in the West on the harmonic, accompanied by Daroon Othman playing the guitar, and amplified by megaphones. The work has intentionally not been translated into English. The words of protest remain in their own language and are not adapted to the rhetorical frames of protest elsewhere, stressing that the work is taking place within the protest and is not a work about the protest. The artist transforms Morricone’s song into a signal of protest and defiance by appropriating a ‘western’ motif into a local ‘eastern’ reality. While playing the harmonica during the demonstration, the artist inhales teargas, and attempts to quash its effect with lemon juice, a known detoxifying agent. The title of the work also refers to the use of lethal gas against Kurdish people in the 1988 genocide attempt by Saddam Hussein’s forces. Survivors of this attack recall that the deadly gas smelled of apples; the smell has since had a strong presence in the collective memory of Kurdish people. As such, the scent memory of these fruits connect these two events in a decades-long history of oppression and resistance.