Reflection on Hamja Ahsan’s salon by Anna Lina Litz
Surviving Documenta:
Trauma, Solidarity and Fried Chicken
Three years after participating in Documenta 15, Hamja Ahsan is still seeking out space to make his story heard in the European art-sphere. In March 2025, Artistic Research Foundation provided such space. An audience of about thirty people gathered on the atelier’s two floors and the foundation’s founder A.W.Doom entered the stage only to leave it to Hamja: “I am honoured that Hamja is here, and I’d like it to be his house for tonight.”
Fried Chicken and Power
Hamja began in signature satire fashion: “My name is Hamja Ahsan, I am the commander-in-chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Fried Chicken and I am on a never ending world tour to overthrow capital-imperialism and the German state via the medium of fried chicken.”
“So what is fried chicken?”, he asked. “Why is it appropriated at the highest level of power? What would it be like if it were represented by the communities themselves?”
A mark of progress, for one thing, in his mission to destroy fascism and imperialism. Case in point:
The building which hosted the headquarters of the British Union of Fascists in 1934 has today transformed into a kebab and pizza shop selling fried chicken. Famous fried chicken shop Chico’s in London has a mural for murdered Palestinian journalists where people from all over the world can leave messages of solidarity and support. In order to boycott coca cola, they even brew their own, ‘The people’s cola’. The shift to the right in recent elections took its toll on European art-capitals’ fried chicken scenes: “When Meloni was elected there was no fried chicken in Venice, and with the surge of the AFD in Germany all my favourite fried chicken shops in Kassel were closed”.
Hamja pointed to a “significant moment in art history” in his native London: Maria Balshaw, director of Tate Modern, remarked that she was delighted to see a ‘group of young men’ watching the film Ashes (2002–15) by Black director and video artist Steve McQueen, ‘with their fried chicken lunch’. While Balshaw faced backlash over this remark, Hamja took it as inspiration: “Instead of thinking of fried chicken as an outside phenomenon, what would happen if we had it on the inside? How would it transform art spaces? If the curator of the Venice Biennale ate fried chicken, would the Venice Biennale look different?”
The context of Documenta 15
These questions were part of the inspiration behind his work for Documenta 15, the 15th edition of a contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, since 1955. Documenta 15 ran from June to September 2022 under the artistic direction of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. It was the first time Documenta was led by a collective, had Asian curators, and curators from a Muslim-majority nation. Members of ruangrupa, as well as members of the artistic team Gertrude Flentge, were present in the salon audience. The curatorial principle everything entered around was lumbung, practicing an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution — “So I was very happy to be there.”
The history
Hamja referred to Documenta 11, which took place twenty years earlier in 2002 under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor and is seen as an important decolonial break to this day, as one of his principal inspirations. “Looking back at the catalogue, I think what ruangrupa did was far more revolutionary, far more generous, far more inclusive, and a far greater break than Enwezor’s Documenta 11”, he reflected. “But I don’t think Germany can take much credit.” He quoted Enwezor, who became very pessimistic about the political climate in Germany towards the end of his life:
“The political climate in this country is causing young people to give up everything that has been achieved in the past decade. You can see this most clearly in dealing with the refugees. When I was the appointed head of Documenta in Kassel in 1998, Germany was arguing about dual citizenship. But in today's debate, the level of hostility is really dangerous.”
This hostile political climate also affected the artists exhibiting at documenta 15. Hamja mentioned several factors that conspired to make the experience one of fear and trauma instead of artistic exploration and togetherness: Germany’s resolution, passed in 2019, which classifies BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) as an anti-semitic movement, placing under scrutiny even artists who are deemed ‘BDS-adjacent’, a far-right outcry about the public funding of the exhibition, general political shift to the right, rising islamophobia (flagged by Human Rights Watch in 2024), and a history of racist violence including the NSU and Hanau murders, some of which took place not far from Kassel.
The work
Nonetheless, when Documenta 15 started, Hamja put into action his plan to bring fried chicken into the museum and the museum into fried chicken. “When you go to see Kassel in between Documenta, it's very dead.”, he said. “At art openings, every single person was White. But Kassel is a very Black and Brown city. It's full of Syrian refugees, Afghan refugees, and you see the same three shops, like a Turkish bar, a kebab shop, and a mobile phone shop just repeat themselves.” He installed a number of LED signs for fictional fried chicken shops around the city adjacent to the exhibition venues. “This one, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Fried Chicken was reported to the police”, he said, explaining that the name actually refers to the Tooting Popular Front from the British sitcom Citizen Smith. He also took members of the curatorial and mediation teams to eat fried chicken in the local shops close to the museums: “I thought it would help them communicate better.” They held curatorial debates to determine which was the best chicken shop in town. Hamja even installed a fried chicken shop above the overpriced restaurant in the Documenta exhibition: “They got really annoyed at me because everyone kept asking where the fried chicken was.”
The violence
At the same time, Hamja and many other artists were subjected to a constant barrage of threats and hostility, and even violence. AFD politicians making comments about ‘degenerate art’, stickers on Documenta buildings with hateful messages like ‘Fight Islam Consistently’ and ‘No Compromise with Barbarism’, vandalism of his exhibition venue, shared with Gazan art collective Eltiqua, which was sprayed with the name of Spanish neo-nazi Isabel Peralta and the murder code 187. “At some points I got well over 100 hate messages a day”, Hamja recounted. Other artists were even harassed physically: “an Indian queer art collective was violently attacked in the street, a collective of Afro-Caribbean artists from Haiti were harassed inside the exhibition space, a Moroccan collective was abused in the street and told to go back home…”
When reporting these incidents to Documenta staff, artists were met with disbelief and received little to no response. “I would often have this conversation with White Germans”, Hamja said: “It was like if I told someone I saw a black dog they'd tell me I saw a white cat. Without any real support from the institution, how could we host any of our invited collaborators?”
He described documenta15 as “the most terrifying moment I have experienced in the art space.” Since the events around it have still not been contextualised from the artists’ perspectives in German media, art journals, or conferences, Hamja used the salon as an opportunity to make his side of the story heard. “I think the truth hides under rocks and stones”, he said. “it’s often lost in things like emails, podcasts and all these in-between spaces”.
Support from the Sensitive White Man
To reclaim it, he asked Willem Velthoven to read out an email addressed by his ‘sensitive white man’ ally Nicholas Brown to the CEO of documenta following Hamja’s de-platforming in September 2022.
Brown, who is a PhD candidate and librarian at Stuart Hall library, expresses concern about the racist and islamophobic threats and abuse Hamja faced during his time as a Documenta artist, as well as demonisation in the German national media as a result of participating in the exhibition.
“I believe that the senior management of documenta has failed in its duty of care towards him.”, the email reads, referencing an article in BILD Zeitung labelling Hamja as a “hate artist” taking German tax payers money, while calling him anti-Semitic due to his support for pro-Palestinian causes. Accompanied by a large photograph, the article’s inciting tone increased chances of him being a target of violence. Brown decries Documenta’s inaction in the face of this narrative, even after concerns for physical safety and mental health were repeatedly raised by Hamja: “I believe Documenta has failed by not challenging these attacks, which are designed to inculcate, impede understanding and remove humor or nuance, especially odd given Hamja's work is a series of satirical videos and signs about fictional chicken shops and Islamophobia.” The mail ends: “Hamja is a remarkable individual, a neurodiverse artist and champion of neurodiversity with a history of resilience, including anti-racism and social justice campaigning in the case of state harassment. But the constant inundation of threats, racism and misrepresentations without institutional support or provision of care must take their toll. […] We defend the right of artists and their work to rethink, expose and criticise fixed patterns of thought. We applaud the artists who have been resilient in the face of attacks on their integrity and have remained true to the principles of lumbung. I hope that the senior management of Documenta takes urgent action to address the ongoing harm that is being perpetrated against exhibiting artists.”
The ongoing curse of the court case
In addition to the harassment during Documenta, Hamja was later persecuted by the German state under the accusation of ‘Volksverhetzung’ for two Facebook posts while already back in London, referring to German chancellor at the time, Olaf Scholz, as a “fascist pig”.
“Three years later, I got fined 12 thousand euros or a prison sentence”, he told us. “A very disturbing precedent. I don't take what happened to me as an individual tragedy, it is also a representation of the state affairs currently in Germany”. The ‘state of affairs’ refers to increasing repression of free speech and protest, especially when connected to pro-Palestinian causes.
The statement
Hamja read out a long statement delivered in his absence by his defence lawyer, Alexander Gorski (known for other defence cases connected to the Palestine protest movement, including that of the ‘Berlin four’) during the German court hearing in June 2024.
In it, he explains his history as an artist, from earning a Fine Arts degree at Central St. Martin’s and Master’s in critical writing and curatorial practice from Chelsea College of Art in London, to twenty years of cultural work writing books, curating exhibitions, and organising festivals.
“I'm particularly proud of my book Shy Radicals, which I published in 2017, in which I examine the role of introverts in social movements from a variety of perspectives.”, the statement goes on. It details Hamja’s economic precarity and unstable artist’s income, as well as suffering from chronic bipolar affective disorder, all to contextualise the events that took place during and in the aftermath of Documenta 15. “At first, I was delighted to be engaged as an artist for the Documenta because it's been my dream ever since I discovered the Documenta 11 and Documenta 10 catalogues in Central Saint Martins University Library during my freshman year. Okwui Enwezor, the first person of colour to curate Documenta, became my hero and role model. His decolonial vision of equality for Asian, African, and Latin American peoples inspired me for life.” The statement continued: “With my exhibition, I wanted to encourage people to think and act against racism and exclusion, and create symbolic places for this purpose. But on site, the atmosphere turned out to be very different from what I had expected. Many artists who were to exhibit at the Documenta, and in particular the Indonesian artist group ruangrupa and myself, were quickly subjected to harsh and aggressive attacks. We were unjustly accused of our work as being anti-Semitic, and this quickly led to the public scandal, which I'm sure you can still remember about today, which forms the context of the event in question.” In the context of the exhibition and surrounding media coverage, Hamja himself had to endure an onslaught of insults on the internet: “I quickly perceived the atmosphere as a climate of fear, especially for non-white Muslim people. He was repeatedly subjected to vile and racist insults online while working in Germany. From this he deduced that “it's completely normal for people to be able to call other people names on the internet that are below the belt and without criminal consequence.” Under the backdrop of online assault as well as rallies by German politicians in front of the exhibition venue, he became more and more worried about his physical safety and his mental health worsened. Documenta did not react to requests for support or possibilities of legal action against defamation and threats.
Around the same time, June 2022, Olaf Scholz cancelled his visit to Documenta 15 with reference to the anti-Semitism there. About this, Hamja’s statement read: “I was very emotional about this event, as I was already, as described above, in an exceptional psychological situation. In addition, I was deeply disgusted by the policies of Germany's current Chancellor. In particular, the supply of weapons to Ukraine and the blatant armament of Germany, which Olaf Scholz proclaimed in the Bundestag on February 27, 2022.” Hamja stated that he’s been active in the UK’s anti-war movement for many years, campaigning “for public money to spend on education, training and culture rather than missiles, guns and weapons for war.” All this moved him to write the damning Facebook posts. He explained that in the UK, such statements aren’t unusual: “I'm used to political disputes being fought out with very tough language and very clear words.” Against the background of various British incidents in which political opponents used similar language, Hamja “never had the feeling that I was breaking the law. I was in no way aware my comments could be punishable. For me, they were a contribution to a political debate that was fiercely fought on all sides.” He also felt protected by Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which protects freedom of expression. He ended the statement with the words: “I am eternally grateful to the city of Kassel, the Documenta staff, some of whom are in the room, and the people locally and around the world who have taken time to appreciate my work. Documenta is Germany's gift to the world, and I hope that it will survive, and Germany can overcome the problems of racism and xenophobia.”
Following the reading of this statement in the German court, the €12,000 fine was reduced to €4,000 by the judges.
The future
Hamja continues his research into the power and politics of fried chicken across various countries (excluding Germany), which will be collected and published in his forthcoming second book, Radical Chicken.
How do you digest so much hurt, injustice and institutional failure?
Why of course: with more fried chicken. We provided a vegan variant of fried oyster mushrooms, sourced and prepared personally by artist Arne Hendriks in the outside kitchen and served on a running basis to salon guests, who stayed for on for much needed conversation and drinks after the lecture. Hamja, who turned out to be an avid watcher of dart tournaments, complimented the chef on the mushroom-chicken: ‘You scored a nine darter with these!’
While the concerned audience didn’t quite allow Hamja to turn this story into the 90-minute stand-up routine he later told us he’d aspired to deliver, they expressed support and solidarity nevertheless.
You can choose to do the same:
Follow on IG @shyradicals, donate on Hamja’s website, buy Shy Radicals.
Fried Chicken and Power
Hamja began in signature satire fashion: “My name is Hamja Ahsan, I am the commander-in-chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Fried Chicken and I am on a never ending world tour to overthrow capital-imperialism and the German state via the medium of fried chicken.”
“So what is fried chicken?”, he asked. “Why is it appropriated at the highest level of power? What would it be like if it were represented by the communities themselves?”
A mark of progress, for one thing, in his mission to destroy fascism and imperialism. Case in point:
The building which hosted the headquarters of the British Union of Fascists in 1934 has today transformed into a kebab and pizza shop selling fried chicken. Famous fried chicken shop Chico’s in London has a mural for murdered Palestinian journalists where people from all over the world can leave messages of solidarity and support. In order to boycott coca cola, they even brew their own, ‘The people’s cola’. The shift to the right in recent elections took its toll on European art-capitals’ fried chicken scenes: “When Meloni was elected there was no fried chicken in Venice, and with the surge of the AFD in Germany all my favourite fried chicken shops in Kassel were closed”.
Hamja pointed to a “significant moment in art history” in his native London: Maria Balshaw, director of Tate Modern, remarked that she was delighted to see a ‘group of young men’ watching the film Ashes (2002–15) by Black director and video artist Steve McQueen, ‘with their fried chicken lunch’. While Balshaw faced backlash over this remark, Hamja took it as inspiration: “Instead of thinking of fried chicken as an outside phenomenon, what would happen if we had it on the inside? How would it transform art spaces? If the curator of the Venice Biennale ate fried chicken, would the Venice Biennale look different?”
The context of Documenta 15
These questions were part of the inspiration behind his work for Documenta 15, the 15th edition of a contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, since 1955. Documenta 15 ran from June to September 2022 under the artistic direction of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. It was the first time Documenta was led by a collective, had Asian curators, and curators from a Muslim-majority nation. Members of ruangrupa, as well as members of the artistic team Gertrude Flentge, were present in the salon audience. The curatorial principle everything entered around was lumbung, practicing an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution — “So I was very happy to be there.”
The history
Hamja referred to Documenta 11, which took place twenty years earlier in 2002 under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor and is seen as an important decolonial break to this day, as one of his principal inspirations. “Looking back at the catalogue, I think what ruangrupa did was far more revolutionary, far more generous, far more inclusive, and a far greater break than Enwezor’s Documenta 11”, he reflected. “But I don’t think Germany can take much credit.” He quoted Enwezor, who became very pessimistic about the political climate in Germany towards the end of his life:
“The political climate in this country is causing young people to give up everything that has been achieved in the past decade. You can see this most clearly in dealing with the refugees. When I was the appointed head of Documenta in Kassel in 1998, Germany was arguing about dual citizenship. But in today's debate, the level of hostility is really dangerous.”
This hostile political climate also affected the artists exhibiting at documenta 15. Hamja mentioned several factors that conspired to make the experience one of fear and trauma instead of artistic exploration and togetherness: Germany’s resolution, passed in 2019, which classifies BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) as an anti-semitic movement, placing under scrutiny even artists who are deemed ‘BDS-adjacent’, a far-right outcry about the public funding of the exhibition, general political shift to the right, rising islamophobia (flagged by Human Rights Watch in 2024), and a history of racist violence including the NSU and Hanau murders, some of which took place not far from Kassel.
The work
Nonetheless, when Documenta 15 started, Hamja put into action his plan to bring fried chicken into the museum and the museum into fried chicken. “When you go to see Kassel in between Documenta, it's very dead.”, he said. “At art openings, every single person was White. But Kassel is a very Black and Brown city. It's full of Syrian refugees, Afghan refugees, and you see the same three shops, like a Turkish bar, a kebab shop, and a mobile phone shop just repeat themselves.” He installed a number of LED signs for fictional fried chicken shops around the city adjacent to the exhibition venues. “This one, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Fried Chicken was reported to the police”, he said, explaining that the name actually refers to the Tooting Popular Front from the British sitcom Citizen Smith. He also took members of the curatorial and mediation teams to eat fried chicken in the local shops close to the museums: “I thought it would help them communicate better.” They held curatorial debates to determine which was the best chicken shop in town. Hamja even installed a fried chicken shop above the overpriced restaurant in the Documenta exhibition: “They got really annoyed at me because everyone kept asking where the fried chicken was.”
The violence
At the same time, Hamja and many other artists were subjected to a constant barrage of threats and hostility, and even violence. AFD politicians making comments about ‘degenerate art’, stickers on Documenta buildings with hateful messages like ‘Fight Islam Consistently’ and ‘No Compromise with Barbarism’, vandalism of his exhibition venue, shared with Gazan art collective Eltiqua, which was sprayed with the name of Spanish neo-nazi Isabel Peralta and the murder code 187. “At some points I got well over 100 hate messages a day”, Hamja recounted. Other artists were even harassed physically: “an Indian queer art collective was violently attacked in the street, a collective of Afro-Caribbean artists from Haiti were harassed inside the exhibition space, a Moroccan collective was abused in the street and told to go back home…”
When reporting these incidents to Documenta staff, artists were met with disbelief and received little to no response. “I would often have this conversation with White Germans”, Hamja said: “It was like if I told someone I saw a black dog they'd tell me I saw a white cat. Without any real support from the institution, how could we host any of our invited collaborators?”
He described documenta15 as “the most terrifying moment I have experienced in the art space.” Since the events around it have still not been contextualised from the artists’ perspectives in German media, art journals, or conferences, Hamja used the salon as an opportunity to make his side of the story heard. “I think the truth hides under rocks and stones”, he said. “it’s often lost in things like emails, podcasts and all these in-between spaces”.
Support from the Sensitive White Man
To reclaim it, he asked Willem Velthoven to read out an email addressed by his ‘sensitive white man’ ally Nicholas Brown to the CEO of documenta following Hamja’s de-platforming in September 2022.
Brown, who is a PhD candidate and librarian at Stuart Hall library, expresses concern about the racist and islamophobic threats and abuse Hamja faced during his time as a Documenta artist, as well as demonisation in the German national media as a result of participating in the exhibition.
“I believe that the senior management of documenta has failed in its duty of care towards him.”, the email reads, referencing an article in BILD Zeitung labelling Hamja as a “hate artist” taking German tax payers money, while calling him anti-Semitic due to his support for pro-Palestinian causes. Accompanied by a large photograph, the article’s inciting tone increased chances of him being a target of violence. Brown decries Documenta’s inaction in the face of this narrative, even after concerns for physical safety and mental health were repeatedly raised by Hamja: “I believe Documenta has failed by not challenging these attacks, which are designed to inculcate, impede understanding and remove humor or nuance, especially odd given Hamja's work is a series of satirical videos and signs about fictional chicken shops and Islamophobia.” The mail ends: “Hamja is a remarkable individual, a neurodiverse artist and champion of neurodiversity with a history of resilience, including anti-racism and social justice campaigning in the case of state harassment. But the constant inundation of threats, racism and misrepresentations without institutional support or provision of care must take their toll. […] We defend the right of artists and their work to rethink, expose and criticise fixed patterns of thought. We applaud the artists who have been resilient in the face of attacks on their integrity and have remained true to the principles of lumbung. I hope that the senior management of Documenta takes urgent action to address the ongoing harm that is being perpetrated against exhibiting artists.”
The ongoing curse of the court case
In addition to the harassment during Documenta, Hamja was later persecuted by the German state under the accusation of ‘Volksverhetzung’ for two Facebook posts while already back in London, referring to German chancellor at the time, Olaf Scholz, as a “fascist pig”.
“Three years later, I got fined 12 thousand euros or a prison sentence”, he told us. “A very disturbing precedent. I don't take what happened to me as an individual tragedy, it is also a representation of the state affairs currently in Germany”. The ‘state of affairs’ refers to increasing repression of free speech and protest, especially when connected to pro-Palestinian causes.
The statement
Hamja read out a long statement delivered in his absence by his defence lawyer, Alexander Gorski (known for other defence cases connected to the Palestine protest movement, including that of the ‘Berlin four’) during the German court hearing in June 2024.
In it, he explains his history as an artist, from earning a Fine Arts degree at Central St. Martin’s and Master’s in critical writing and curatorial practice from Chelsea College of Art in London, to twenty years of cultural work writing books, curating exhibitions, and organising festivals.
“I'm particularly proud of my book Shy Radicals, which I published in 2017, in which I examine the role of introverts in social movements from a variety of perspectives.”, the statement goes on. It details Hamja’s economic precarity and unstable artist’s income, as well as suffering from chronic bipolar affective disorder, all to contextualise the events that took place during and in the aftermath of Documenta 15. “At first, I was delighted to be engaged as an artist for the Documenta because it's been my dream ever since I discovered the Documenta 11 and Documenta 10 catalogues in Central Saint Martins University Library during my freshman year. Okwui Enwezor, the first person of colour to curate Documenta, became my hero and role model. His decolonial vision of equality for Asian, African, and Latin American peoples inspired me for life.” The statement continued: “With my exhibition, I wanted to encourage people to think and act against racism and exclusion, and create symbolic places for this purpose. But on site, the atmosphere turned out to be very different from what I had expected. Many artists who were to exhibit at the Documenta, and in particular the Indonesian artist group ruangrupa and myself, were quickly subjected to harsh and aggressive attacks. We were unjustly accused of our work as being anti-Semitic, and this quickly led to the public scandal, which I'm sure you can still remember about today, which forms the context of the event in question.” In the context of the exhibition and surrounding media coverage, Hamja himself had to endure an onslaught of insults on the internet: “I quickly perceived the atmosphere as a climate of fear, especially for non-white Muslim people. He was repeatedly subjected to vile and racist insults online while working in Germany. From this he deduced that “it's completely normal for people to be able to call other people names on the internet that are below the belt and without criminal consequence.” Under the backdrop of online assault as well as rallies by German politicians in front of the exhibition venue, he became more and more worried about his physical safety and his mental health worsened. Documenta did not react to requests for support or possibilities of legal action against defamation and threats.
Around the same time, June 2022, Olaf Scholz cancelled his visit to Documenta 15 with reference to the anti-Semitism there. About this, Hamja’s statement read: “I was very emotional about this event, as I was already, as described above, in an exceptional psychological situation. In addition, I was deeply disgusted by the policies of Germany's current Chancellor. In particular, the supply of weapons to Ukraine and the blatant armament of Germany, which Olaf Scholz proclaimed in the Bundestag on February 27, 2022.” Hamja stated that he’s been active in the UK’s anti-war movement for many years, campaigning “for public money to spend on education, training and culture rather than missiles, guns and weapons for war.” All this moved him to write the damning Facebook posts. He explained that in the UK, such statements aren’t unusual: “I'm used to political disputes being fought out with very tough language and very clear words.” Against the background of various British incidents in which political opponents used similar language, Hamja “never had the feeling that I was breaking the law. I was in no way aware my comments could be punishable. For me, they were a contribution to a political debate that was fiercely fought on all sides.” He also felt protected by Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which protects freedom of expression. He ended the statement with the words: “I am eternally grateful to the city of Kassel, the Documenta staff, some of whom are in the room, and the people locally and around the world who have taken time to appreciate my work. Documenta is Germany's gift to the world, and I hope that it will survive, and Germany can overcome the problems of racism and xenophobia.”
Following the reading of this statement in the German court, the €12,000 fine was reduced to €4,000 by the judges.
The future
Hamja continues his research into the power and politics of fried chicken across various countries (excluding Germany), which will be collected and published in his forthcoming second book, Radical Chicken.
How do you digest so much hurt, injustice and institutional failure?
Why of course: with more fried chicken. We provided a vegan variant of fried oyster mushrooms, sourced and prepared personally by artist Arne Hendriks in the outside kitchen and served on a running basis to salon guests, who stayed for on for much needed conversation and drinks after the lecture. Hamja, who turned out to be an avid watcher of dart tournaments, complimented the chef on the mushroom-chicken: ‘You scored a nine darter with these!’
While the concerned audience didn’t quite allow Hamja to turn this story into the 90-minute stand-up routine he later told us he’d aspired to deliver, they expressed support and solidarity nevertheless.
You can choose to do the same:
Follow on IG @shyradicals, donate on Hamja’s website, buy Shy Radicals.