Fear of fried chicken
Kassel, home to the Brothers Grimm, is considered the birthplace of the fairytale. Every five years, the city hosts Documenta, perhaps the most prestigious international art exhibition in the world. The 2022 edition, Documenta 15, was curated by Ruangrupa, a group from Indonesia, the event’s first collective curator and second from the global south.
At Documenta 15, 14 new LED signs sprung up at 8 different locations across the city, all advertising fictitious chicken shops, such as “Kaliphate Fried Chicken – Feeding the Ummah Since 1924” or “Mmmoors – Moorish Fried Chicken!”. They were the work of British artist Hamja Ahsan and sought to reclaim fried chicken for the Muslim communities associated with these shops. “I wanted to be ironic, to create space for the rising phenomena of the chicken shop and what it now symbolises,” he told Middle East Eye. “Many see the rise of chicken shops, especially in the UK but also in other Western European countries, as the rise of Islamification. But what these places actually offer are spaces that are beyond borders, beyond nation-states, beyond ethnicities and beyond languages. Fried chicken has the power to do that.”
Ahsan’s project is an ongoing one, “a way for me to navigate the art world”, and he’s taken it to Barcelona, Brussels, Slovenia, even Venice. He’s working on a book, Radical Chicken, but it also exists as walks, as an education programme, and is integrated into some of the Palestine activism he has done. The project, at its root, Ahsan explains, “has become a metaphor for race struggle, class struggle.”
Documenta 15, which sought to elaborate on Ruangrupa’s practice of lumbung – the name of a rice barn that stores rice for communal use and works as a metaphor for the pooling of collective resources – was overshadowed by debates in Germany about the wider exhibition’s perceived antisemitism. Due to Ahsan’s prominent advocacy of the Palestinian cause, he was one of many targeted by those who sought to shut the event down. Since then, he’s sought to use the project to push back against the racist police repression in Germany. The controversy around his project forms an ironic fairytale of our times, echoing the very question he was asking: who is afraid of fried chicken?
Christabel Stewart
