The distinction between the social and the political makes no
sense in the modern world because the struggle to make
something public is a struggle for justice.1
In 2008, the first Women’s Arts and Modern Painting Exhibition was held in Kabul, organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan. For the first time in Afghan history, the public crowded into a small gallery during the harsh Kabul winter to view the work of Afghan women artists. The artists, aged between sixteen and twenty-five, had created a collection that burst away from any semblance of tradition and that the curator, Rahraw Omarzad—a passionate advocate of contemporary art and veteran of Kabul’s turbulent art scene since the 1970s—described to me as “symbolically expressing their experiences from life in the framework of new artistic concepts.”
Five hundred years ago, Herat, the Afghan cultural capital of the Timurid period (c. 1370–1507) was Central Asia’s spiritual, scientific, and artistic hub. Miniatures, illuminated and illustrated manuscripts, tile work, and distinct new forms of architecture made their way to Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Indian kingdoms. The land that is now Afghanistan had its own schools and produced some of the world’s great artists, such as the Herati miniature painter Kamaluddin Behzad (c. 1450–1535), who illustrated, among other works, the Khamsa (Quintet) of the Persian poet, Nizami.2 Although the historical record excludes mention of female artists, women were patrons, commissioning and financing art and architecture. The tomb of Herat’s Queen Gowar Shad, who reigned during the fifteenth century, is a place of reverence for modern Heratis. Evidence of her philanthropy still exists everywhere in the city, including a women’s garden, which she caused to be built and which was renovated in recent years.
Although the Timurid period is largely considered to be the peak of Afghanistan’s artistic glory, the region was also situated along the famed Silk Road and became a crossroads for cultural exchange from North Africa, the Near East, and Europe into Asia. India’s Mughal Empire was launched in 1526 from Kabul by the Timurid prince Babur. Its cultural zenith is thought to have taken place from 1556, with the reign of Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar (Akbar the Great), through the death in 1707 of Emperor Aurangzeb, although the empire continued for another 150 years, bringing the arts of the known world together in a great flourishing.
In 1924, King Amanullah (r. 1919–1929) established the Kabul Museum, which grew to house one of the largest, most valuable collections in Central Asia. Western art styles were beginning to encroach on Afghanistan, and in the 1930s, Ghulam Muhammad Musawwer Maimanagi opened what became the Kabul Fine Arts College in 1955, now the Maimanagi Afghan Traditional Arts Training School, which teaches miniature painting, calligraphy, woodworking, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and jewelry-making to male and female students. Kabul University opened its art department in 1967.
Nancy Hatch Dupree, Afghanistan’s best-known resident historian, described the tenuous foundation of visual art in the mid-twentieth century:
Artists failed to experience the same surge in popularity as the musicians and actors. The work of urban artists was fundamentally eclectic, following various styles from bucolic pastoral scenes to Picasso and Grandma Moses without any assimilation of recognizable Afghan characteristics to satisfy Afghan cultural values. Some leading artists actively sought to revive the traditions of the Timurid School in Herat. Official patronage of talent in the provinces brought to prominence two Khirghis artists from the Wakhan and an elderly gentleman from Aibak whose work celebrated epic heroes. But generally, artists failed to win public support. To collect Afghan art never became fashionable among Afghans or even foreign tourists, so it was a discouraging road for most artists. Efforts to open an art gallery to encourage artists did not materialize at this time.3
With the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan came to be associated more with Kalashnikovs and refugees than with exquisite artwork. The civil war following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 between Mujahedin factions centered in Kabul, accelerated the erosion of the arts. In 1994, a rocket destroyed much of the Kabul Museum and many of its artifacts. The university art department was destroyed, along with most of the rest of the school. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they made the obliteration of art, particularly pre-Islamic art, an official policy. Eighty percent of what remained of the museum was looted.4
Those who continued to make art clandestinely risked their lives. Most artists fled. Nevertheless, Afghanistan is full of remarkable stories of defiance during the Taliban years. Men and women not only ran underground schools for girls and health clinics for women, they also kept arts and culture alive. Children played in the streets of Herat to guard against Taliban police while mixed-sex literary circles took place inside homes under the guise of sewing circles.5 Musicians risked death to hear the sounds of their rababs and buried their instruments to safeguard them from destruction, only retrieving them years later.6
Little more than a decade later, the arts in Afghanistan are reemerging, and this time, the women are there, not as patrons or the subjects of Timurid miniatures but as artists in their own rights. They are leaving their mark on the country’s nascent new wave of contemporary artistic expression, bold, defiant, and full of potential. They are not so much filling a void as diversifying the art scene from women’s traditional artistic activities—embroidery, carpet making, silk weaving, pottery.
The Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan’s 2008 exhibition featured painting and sculpture, which often expressed the grim realities many Afghan women face in their daily lives, speaking to experiences of deprivation and oppression but also to hope and imagination. The young artists avoided representation and displayed a wide array of modern and contemporary art forms. Reactions from the media and public came from all directions: some wildly negative criticisms from Afghans unaccustomed to abstract art, as well as heaps of praise from those welcoming a renaissance in the stagnant arts scene. Rahraw Omarzad, who founded the CCAA, was overwhelmed with pride. It was a watershed moment and, he hoped, just the beginning.
Two hundred women showed up to register for classes when the center opened in 2004. Instruction is offered in everything from installation and video art to photography, painting, and drawing. The founding group of Afghan female and male artists, backed by an international advisory board, decided to place a heavy emphasis on supporting women. The Female Artistic Center is the school’s hallmark program. In 2009, sixty women were enrolled in painting and drawing classes.
By contrast, only 10 percent of students at Kabul University’s rebuilt Fine Arts Faculty are female. In any event, the few Afghans with the means to attend the country’s four universities are not turning to art as their first choice in studies. As in many Western countries, art in Afghanistan is often seen as frivolous compared with “serious” professions that will help feed families and contribute to the country’s much-needed reconstruction and economic development. As Constance Wyndham, cultural projects officer at Kabul’s Turquoise Mountain Foundation wrote, “Art can seem superfluous in a country that doesn’t yet have proper roads.”7
Admittance into engineering, law, and medicine is highly competitive, requiring just the right mix of money and merit. Kabul University’s Fine Arts Faculty, however, is a dusty Soviet-era corner on campus with few resources and little prestige. Upon returning to her country of birth for the first time since childhood, Afghan American video artist Lida Abdul recalled, “My going there to do art seemed rather inconsiderate. Did they really need art classes?”8 Misgivings abound, yet something still draws artists back to their homeland—and it is hardly frivolous.
Basic humanitarian assistance is limited. More is needed, including cultural capital to infuse a scarred population with pride and enthusiasm for a different kind of future. Aid givers are beginning to think of “development” in new ways, seeing art as anything but superfluous. Viable reconstruction in Afghanistan and its peace-building ambitions depend as much on repairing the social and cultural fabric of the country as on building physical infrastructures and institutions. Imagination and invention are required for lasting change. Dupree believes that Afghans’ “determination to remain true to the essence of their culture is innate. The nation is traumatized, but the culture still lives.”9
In a country of wide ethnic, linguistic, and tribal differences, the sparse threads that bind are the profound love of poetry, the persistence of folk songs and tales, a reverence for jokes and proverbs and the skills to tell them, and music, art, and literature that cross all boundaries. These instil pride, national unity, and a deeper sense of heritage among people struggling to make sense of what it means to be Afghan in this little splash of land pulled apart repeatedly by internal and external spoilers.
But for women, art can mean even more. Living in the delicate aftermath of gender apartheid, there are few spaces—conceptual or physical—where women find visibility and voice. Ancient customs of social segregation keep many women relegated to the private sphere. Despite a constitution that guarantees equality and a quota of secure seats in parliament, the chasm is still wide between Afghanistan’s daring women parliamentarians and its female masses.10 For many Afghan women, their most profound political act might be to step outside their home compounds without permission or a male chaperone, or to sign up for a basic literacy class. Families resist sending a daughter to art school and are often uncomfortable when men and women study together, so for now, CCAA offers women-only art classes. Exposure to the public realm can be risky business.11
How might this divide be narrowed? The worlds of art and culture could hold a key. Visual art may be a relatively safer mode of self-expression than other forms, which are often poisoned by self- and official censorship. What you cannot say aloud or in print, you can describe in paint, charcoal, or pencil. Perhaps this explains why abstract and other forms of nonrepresentational art are growing roots among young Afghan women such as those at the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan. Art is a means of resistance and healing, as well as an outlet for suppressed talent. It provides a platform for articulating beauty, drawing out caches of memory and happiness in an environment often preoccupied by the consequences of violence. It empowers the artist and the viewer.
As a refugee in Pakistan, Yalda Noori was exposed to painting when she enrolled in a course in Islamabad. After returning to Afghanistan, she picked it up again, but this time, at CCAA, she had fewer limits on her creativity. Her paintings are adorned with lamp shades, “unsustainable,” she says in an artist’s statement, “just like dreams.”12
Twenty-four-year-old, Mariam Formuly says her art is rooted in sorrows common to many Afghan women: the deaths of loved ones in war, forced marriage, and suicide—themes that come up repeatedly. Some of her pieces are made of fabric, sharp edges juxtaposed with ragged ones, contrasting the ideal with the disorder of reality.
Ramzia Tajzada depicts injustice against women, but Moqaddesa Yuresh specifically avoids “harsh and frustrating realities,” concentrating on expressions of hopefulness.13 One Yuresh painting is composed of three squares in bright red, blue, and yellow on a white backdrop, two diagonal slices offering a slight opening, disrupting the perfection of the squares.
Omarzad’s dream is to open women’s art centers across the country. For now, the CCAA, like so many organizations in Afghanistan, is strapped for cash, space, and supplies, restricting its ability to accept new students even in the face of growing demand. The Open Society Institute is one of the center’s few funders, along with the Women of the World Foundation.14 Traditional arts, such as the Khamak embroidery of Kandahar and the famous blue pottery of Istalif (a village north of Kabul), have found support among donors for commercial development and expansion. Yet art for art’s sake, as the human right to self-expression or even as a form of therapy, is a tough sell to donors who want to see tangible outcomes for their dollars, easily measured in numbers.
Omarzad is undaunted. He knows, as Dupree also emphasizes, that the right to make and access art is fundamentally linked to cultural renaissance and national identity, unity, and stability. His long to-do list includes establishing a contemporary visual arts high school for girls, opening a women’s graphic design center to enable distance-learning opportunities, giving women artists the chance to exhibit their work abroad (shows have already been held in Berlin, Istanbul, New York, Kazakhstan, and Switzerland), and making it possible for women to earn graduate degrees in fine arts. His track record suggests Omarzad will eventually realize these projects. Meanwhile, the center has many new undertakings: a textile design program and classes in multimedia exhibition techniques, among others. To help enlighten Kabul’s residents about contemporary art, CCAA is building a mobile cinema unit to travel around the city showing films about art.
Omarzad was born in Kabul in 1964, a time of peace, stability, and promise. He remembers looking at paintings for sale in tourist shop windows in the 1970s, when Afghanistan was an essential stop on the Hippie Trail. He studied fine arts at Kabul University, and then taught there. He also illustrated books for deaf children. He fled the country in 1993, settling in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he continued teaching art. He returned to Kabul in 2002, and he now lectures at the university and has founded the country’s only art magazine, Gahnama-e Hunar (Art Periodical).
The practice of what he calls “copying” leaves Omarzad uninspired. Clichéd representations of landscapes, women in burqas, elderly bearded men, or games of buzkashi are stifling,15 leaving little room for self-expression. And there is no need to be bound to historical legacies. For there to be a new Afghanistan, Omarzad believes, there must be new art by new artists, a fresh start. “We cannot answer the complexity of today’s life with the manifestation of yesterday’s realities,” Omarzad says, quoting Wassily Kandinsky, the artist credited with painting the first modern abstract works. There is nothing more avant garde, Omarzad adds, than to nurture the artwork of women in Afghan society. His vision is of an artistic sector with women inherently linked to the development of an open society. He believes that women’s involvement in art promotes well-being in a place where healing is urgently needed.16
The Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan is one key player in a reviving arts sector. Kabul’s Foundation for Culture and Civil Society serves as an exhibition and performance space, welcoming men and women. Here, everyone has the opportunity to interact and consider what a resurrected cultural landscape might look like when peace arrives.
Meanwhile, Herat University’s Fine Arts Faculty—perhaps in the spirit of Queen Gowhar Shad—has reopened its doors to women, and in Kabul, the Afghan Vocational School of Arts and Music recently came alive after a wartime hiatus with funding from Polska Akcja Humanitarna (Polish Humanitarian Organization), offering calligraphy, painting, ceramics, and sculpture classes to high-school students.
Zolaykha Sherzad runs a design studio in Kabul where she and her team of female and male master tailors produce Afghanistan’s haute couture. Her clothing, artful blends of traditional textiles and styles with modern cuts, is worn by President Hamid Karzai, Afghan diplomats, and Kabul’s expatriate community. She has displayed her work on runways in Dubai, Paris, London, Delhi, and New York. “I want to show people that Afghanistan is not all about war and orphanages and burqas. It is also about textiles and history and culture. It is about beauty.”17
This nascent art scene is a critical infusion into a broader civil society and cultural development movement, and its survival is in part due to those artists, musicians, and poets who persevered to keep the country’s artistic heritage alive through their underground activities. Whereas the international effort must prioritize support to emergency humanitarian assistance and the establishment of basic services, women’s participation in arts and culture can ultimately dismantle some of the structures that facilitated Afghanistan’s descent into chaos.
“The advancement of women and their empowerment,” Omarzad says, “is an integral part of the process of democratization and civilization.”18
1. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 94.
2. “The Timurids: 1387–1502,” Art Arena, http://www.art-arena.com/timurid.htm. Although Herat is today a city in Afghanistan, it has had a turbulent history as part of the Persian Empire. Behzad is considered to be a Persian artist, but those lines were obscure.
3. Nancy Hatch Dupree, “Cultural Heritage and National Identity in Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly 23, no. 5 (2005): 977–989.
4. According to Robin Clewley, the staff at the Kabul Museum destroyed the catalog of the museum’s collection and buried the most precious objects deep underground so they could not be destroyed. In March 2001, the Taliban blew up Bamiyan’s giant, sixth-century Buddha statues, which had been carved directly into a mountain by the pre-Islamic Kushan people. These were the largest Buddhist statues on Earth, a UNESCO world heritage site. Robin Clewley, “Afghan Archivist of Culture,” Wired, November 6, 2001, http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/11/47842.
5. Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage through Afghanistan (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
6. Radio Free Europe-Afghanistan, “Afghanistan: Musicians Struggling to Revive Classical Heritage after Taliban,” Human Beams, November 21, 2005, http://lifeatlarge.humanbeams.com/index.php/lifeatlarge/comments/lf1105rfe_rl_
afghanistanmusic. A rebab is a stringed instrument.
7. See Constance Wyndham, “Afghanistan’s Artistic Side: The Afghan Contemporary Art Prize,” The Financial Times, July 2, 2008). In 2008, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation participated in the launch of the Afghan Contemporary Art Prize. Out of the seventy-five male and female entries, ten won the competition. Turquoise Mountain Foundation’s mandate is to invest “in the regeneration of the historic commercial centre of Kabul, providing basic services, saving historic buildings and constructing a new bazaar and galleries for traditional craft businesses. It has established Afghanistan’s first Higher Education Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, training students to produce works in wood, calligraphy, and ceramics. The Institute has been used to develop new Afghan designs, promote Afghan handicrafts through national and international exhibitions and media campaigns, open new markets, restore key parts of the Kabul Museum collection, renovate public spaces, and build capacity in the government and universities.” www.turquoisemountain.org.
8. Lida Abdul, “Works in the Exhibition “Nafas,’ ” Nafas Art Magazine, May 2006, http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/
articles/2006/nafas_special/nafas_exhibition/artists/lida_abdul.
9. Dupree, “Cultural Heritage and National Identity in Afghanistan.”
10. Women’s organizations, post-2001, pushed for women’s representation on the Constitutional Drafting Committee, and submitted specific recommendations to ensure that the constitution guaranteed women’s rights. See Lauryn Oates and Isabelle Solon Helal, At the Crossroads of Conflict and Democracy: Women and Afghanistan’s Constitution-Making Process (Montreal: Rights and Democracy, 2004).
11. Numerous women with public presences have been murdered, including women’s rights advocate Sitara Achekzai in 2009; Kandahari police officer Malalai Kakar in 2008; Zakia Zaki, a female broadcaster on Peace Radio and Shokiba Sanga Amaaj, of Shamshad in 2007; and Safia Ama Jan, a teacher and women’s rights leader in Kandahar in 2006. And in 2004, the Taliban claimed responsibility for bombing a bus carrying female election workers in Jalalabad, killing two women.
12. The artists’ statement is on CCAA’s website: www.ccaa.org.af.
13. Ibid.
14. The Women of the World Foundation was founded by United States art collector Richard C. Colton and conceptualized by Claudia DeMonte.
15. Buzkashi is a popular Afghan horse sport, which developed on the plains of Mongolia and Central Asia.
16. Recent studies have found exponentially high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder among Afghan women, as well as a dangerously high prevalence of anxiety and depression. See Barbara Lopes Cardozo, Oleg O. Bilukha, Carol A. Gotway, Mitchell I. Wolfe, Michael L. Gerber, and Mark Anderson, “Report from the CDC: Mental Health of Women in Postwar Afghanistan,” Journal of Women’s Health, 14 no. 4 (2005): 285–293. One organization, Rubia (described in “Mending Afghanistan Stitch by Stitch,” in this volume), has also recognized the power of art to heal psychological wounds, supporting women in a drug clinic to use embroidery for recovery.
17. Quoted in Aryn Baker, “Building a Bridge with Style,” Time Style and Design (Fall 2008).
18. I am grateful to Afghan-American artist Gazelle Samizay for her review of an early draft of this chapter, to Rahraw Omarzad for putting up with many nagging emails from me and sending photos of art over a slow Internet connection, and to my friend Abdulrahim Ahmadparwani for his passion for Afghan art, literature, and cultural heritage and for helping to instil this passion in others.