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Exhibition:| „Discovering Democracy - Young Kabul Art 2007“| March 15th 2007 | Kabul, curated by Rahraw Omarzad, Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA)

artists: Nabila Ahmade, Ebrahim Bamiyani, M.Sulaiman-Dawlatzay, Mariam Formaly, Momin Formil. Shamsia Hassani, M. Reza Hosseini, Shabnam Ibrahimi, Wakil Kohsar, M. Nasir Mansurz, Asiya Moheby, Batol Moradi, Jahan Ara Rafig, Mariam Rasool, M.Tamin-Sahebzada, Ramzia Qazy Zada

Leonhardi Kulturprojekte | Felicia Herrschaft

www.leonhardikulturprojekte.org

info@leonhardikulturprojekte.org

Can Afghan democracy be represented in art?

In a working meeting at the beginning of March, we developed the workshop program „Discovering Democracy – Young Kabul Art 2007“and worked together with several artists on the question of how the young democracy in Afghanistan can be represented in art.

At the beginning of the workshop, cameras were distributed to the participating women art students from the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA) so that they could spontaneously take photographs. The main questions addressed here were those of the students’ artistic identities, their artistic perspectives on new developments in Kabul, and the ways in which democratic structures were becoming visible. The subjects they chose for their photographs included new buildings and also the ruins of the royal palace, the new parliament building (which we visited together), the Kabul museum, workers, landscapes, rubbish, building sites, petrol stations, snow-covered mountains, the photographer’s brother eating spring onions and bread, people sitting at computers, an English course. Some reflected cooperation between the students, for example feet arranged together to produce an image of joint work, or shadows the students themselves threw on the wall like the shadows in Plato’s simile of the cave. There was an impressive variety in the photographs taken, which show the conditions under which the students worked.

Most of the photos were taken from inside cars, through closed windows. Why did they not get out? Why had they taken the photos with the windows closed? One of the answers given was: “We didn’t dare get out of the car.” This means that these young, veiled women artists still cannot move freely in their society in order, for example, to take photographs. The lawless condition that prevails in many spheres of this society is demonstrated here: Afghan society has lost its protective function, and life has become unpredictable even though there are freedoms that could be used.

Shamsia, a 19-year old artist from the CCAA, drew a train with an Afghan flag travelling at high speed into a green landscape. Living in new conditions in a state like Afghanistan is associated with progress and freedom. In another drawing, a fist breaks through a pane of glass and seizes hold of freedom before it can disappear again. This is an attempt to take hold of the moment of democracy as it arrives; it has not yet become reality in Afghanistan, but the artists do not want to let it get away.

If one experiences directly the new worlds of the imagination being explored by artists in Afghanistan, one understands the scale of the politics of destruction they have experienced – not just in the Taliban period, but also throughout decades of war.

Cultural identity in Afghanistan involves a tension between individual and collective claims and considerations. Rahraw Omarzad describes his observations, which point to the way in which artistic processes function so as to generate knowledge in Afghanistan, as they do elsewhere. He recognizes individuals in their loneliness; individuals are isolated beings. As an artist, he establishes a new framework of identity. This image shows that in a society like Afghanistan, a world of the imagination is developing which recognizes individuals when an artist can describe isolation in terms of an image. What happens here is that artists take over the function of interpreting the world. These frameworks for artists are very fragile, as can be seen in the way they present their own paintings. One can hardly imagine hanging a painting without a frame, without a certain format, because the cultural experiences needed to establish a framework of one’s own are absent. Because they have no institutional structures, artists in Afghanistan have to occupy several positions simultaneously; people like Omarzad are artists, curators, gallery owners, and responsible for marketing, all at the same time.

In Afghanistan, elementary forms of the societal division of labour have yet to develop. Curators could establish the new framework that would make this possible.

Cultural death or regeneration?

Because of the political situation in Afghanistan, artists in the country are faced with a paradox. How does one survive as an artist when life itself is threatened?

The author Khalid Nawisa wrote recently in Gahnama-e Hunar: “Perhaps the dead are lucky and have an advantage: they can never come to life again because of hunger and cold, but the living can die of hunger and cold.” Artists create sounding boards for themselves by developing joint projects. But what will happen if there is no societal resonance for artists’ ideas and their incorruptible attitude? If women artists like Batol Moradi try to give the victims a voice? The media of the Taliban are being replaced via the use of new media and the discovery of public spaces, but the Taliban can still agitate against democracy from within the mosques. Reza Hosseini’s photograph of the new symbolic world in the form of a faded rose encrusted clay soil illustrates the difficulty of the situation. In a democracy, there are spaces of cultural experience that protect artists and their activities. Artists try to establish their right to be protected in this way because they develop strategies that will enable them to demand public spaces for their works.

During our Kabul workshop, we discussed the significance of the colour red in Barnett Newman’s work.

The intensity of the colour creates a space of experience for the observer into which an awareness of the destruction of Native American culture flows. In response to the question of the meaning the colour red might have in Afghanistan, one artist suggested a room painted entirely in red. This red would contain the violence and destruction of Afghan culture. “Somewhere, a completely red room.” This first image was then replaced by that of a blue room. “In Afghanistan, blue is the colour of peace. We must find peace, find a way of being calm.” These thoughts are an expression of cultural identity in Afghanistan.

A red room would keep alive the idea of cultural death, and is incompatible with the new cultural identity in Afghanistan. This society is regenerating itself in works of art which show that artists in Afghanistan can shape spaces of cultural experience, but these spaces are soaked in blood because life is still endangered.