Sunflowers

Sunflowers is an eight-metre tower assembled from satellite dishes lined with fragments of broken mirror, with cooking pots suspended at their focal points. The mirrored surfaces concentrate sunlight, transforming each dish into a solar cooker capable of heating water and food. An apparatus designed to receive distant signals is reoriented towards an immediate bodily need.

The work draws on a  technique developed by Syrians living under siege amid the enforced scarcity of fuel and electricity. Raised into a public tower, the installation refuses to monumentalise deprivation. It shifts attention from heroic narratives of resilience towards the conditions that made such ingenuity necessary.

Created with twelve Syrian asylum seekers and activists living in Denmark, the work treats survival knowledge as a collective form of authorship. The participations are: Amer Kazkaz, Dima Sada, Fadia Alokla, Ghazal Shemi, Haya Termanini, Joudi Obaide, Lojain Ajek, Ola Ajek, Rami Mahouk, Tarek Kelani, Yasser Omar and Yousef Fares.