1. The Flight of Mountains
When I was a child, I often woke to find that people I had known in my own village had disappeared under cover of night – either having been taken away or having fled. In this work, I use the image of Noah’s Ark, with its barren cargo of tombstones to express the lack of hope I felt then for those whom I felt I would never see again. This sense of instability and fear meant that in my young mind, I used to wonder if the mountains themselves, the predominant element of my childhood landscape, might also take flight and disappear whilst I was sleeping.
2. Ground Zero
From the rubble of the attack on the World Trade Centre, springs destructive and the fiery tree of hatred. Nestled at its roots are the silent victims – the women of Afghanistan - whose very presence has been hitherto unknown, if not ignored, by the world at large, and the subject of vicious repression in their homeland. The livid sky settles after the attack, un-illuminated by the fire springing from the heart of the scene.
3. Modar
Afghanistan, the land itself, is mother to all Afghan people. I have depicted my homeland in this iconic portrait as motherland crowned with mountains, her face inscrutable. The maternal nest has been deserted and rendered inhospitable by its threads of bloodied barbed wire, the legacy of enemy occupation. Her robes are licked by now-familiar flames, whose presence she has learned to tolerate.
4. To Sleep Perchance to Dream
This, the largest work, recounts the story of the fragility of hope in
Afghanistan and the centuries of conquest and plunder it has endured. The sky
itself has become the parched earth of a ravaged land, its one eye closing in a
sleep troubled by waking horrors, a shroud emerging like tears of sorrow.
The
cracked earth reveals the hooves of the first Arab conquest of Afghanistan.
Further conquests are represented by the central wave of blood, whose colour
identifies it with the Communist invasion of last century; the apocalyptic
fiery horses of the invasions of Genghis Khan, and the white shrouds draping
the natural environment, symbolizing the secrecy and concealment of the Taliban
regime. The courage of the women of Afghanistan stands like a wall between the
fires of the Moghul invasion and the central valley of clouds, which mercifully
cradle infants suspended in fragile bubbles. When I was a child, I used to
imagine how peaceful and safe it would be to float in clouds, and my
mother’s constant protection was cloud like to me. The wall of veiled
women, who are turning into stone, supports the supine figure of a cousin of
mine, whose body was carried back to his native village by a group of my female
relatives. My mother is shown as part of this wall, a protecting veil of cloud
extending from her body.
5. Temple of the Soul
This double self-portrait depicts my past, my present and premonitions of the
future. The dark wall of my past is over hung by the galloping hooves of past
fear emerging from brooding clouds.
These clouds enclose a hollow space,
representing the loss of my father when I was a child and too young to
understand what such loss might mean for the future.
The tree from which my living face emerges has been damaged and struggles to seek nourishment from the bare soil of the parched land in which it stands. The negative shapes described by its roots form silhouettes of hanged men, which depict the sense of self-destruction amongst the people of Afghanistan as a result of centuries of tragedy. The twin image is that of my mother, clothed in the endless fire that is constantly threatening her very existence, but which ultimately has failed to do so. The sky scape is veiled from clear view, to represent the occlusion resulting from oppression.
The future is represented by the clear air blowing shoreward from the ocean. I take what might be my first breath in a world different from the one I have known. Windows drift towards me on the water, representing initial contact with the minds of others, as though I am finally able to look into other souls as I would look through windows.
6. My Mother’s Vision
I have used the contrast between the luminous atmosphere of a world suspended in space and time with the monochrome portrait of my mother. She is shown as if encased in a clay shell, again symbolising the constriction of women in Afghanistan and their terrible struggle to emerge into any kind of free space. This painting depicts the only kind free space that is permitted them – the whispered conversations amongst women that are shared with one another only. The spit of land that joins the group of women is symbolic of the tenuous ties of thought and longing that join them. The broken ladders represent the broken ties that exist in the spirit of those who have lost loved ones, or who are ignorant of their whereabouts. A faceless winged woman clings to the scaffolding of broken western promises of freedom, and the illusion that such freedom has been possible. The group of women is confined in a shape that could be the profile of an animal, such is the lowly existence they endure.
7. Penalty Line (Triptych)
This work is anchored by the chilling image smuggled out of Afghanistan of the woman executed in front of thousands of spectators at the Kabul Soccer Stadium. As has often been the case, this film footage sparked immediate outcry in the West, but was followed by inaction. The shadow of her executioner falls before her crouching form, the shadow of his weapon suggesting a cross or crucifix.
Above her is the vision of the sky as it would be seen by this woman when she was a child, enormously distant and available only beyond the looming walls that block it out to her.
The lower third of the triptych contrasts different versions of text and image. The verses of the Koran are those which are recited in times of great fear, here seen swirling about the people who have been hanged in the name of God. Their shadows fall on blank sheets of paper, as though they are mere fodder for the media.
8. Amongst Thorns
Several months prior to the much-condemned and much-publicised destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan at the hands of the Taliban, thousands of people were massacred at the same site. Nothing was ever heard of this event. In this image, I have shown the wisps of their dead shadows floating as if in a dream or as an emanation of the place itself. The amputated leg of the Buddha itself reminds of the terrible loss of limbs and life as a result of the widespread land mining of the countryside by foreign hostiles. For me the steely irony of this sequence of events is that of the destruction of a mere representation of a person seems to far outweigh the destruction of thousands of living beings. Yet from the rubble of the Buddha emerges a flower resembling a human face representing hope and ultimate salvation.
9. In The Shadow of Mountains
When I visited a refugee camp in Afghanistan, I was struck by the endless expanse of canvas shelters erected for those who had either flown from threat or had been forcibly displaced. The shape of the tent-metropolis echoes that of the mountains, neither of which offers real protection or shelter to refugees. And yet, when sitting under one of these tents, I had the feeling of tremendous weight over me, as if the tents themselves were as weighty as mountains. A grieving woman sits despondent on the bare putty-coloured ground, the focus of her pain the tombstone of a dead child pinning her down. Far removed from her sits a lone boy, his feet destroyed by landmines. In place of his natural feet, he appears to be taking root in this hostile place. The futility of this is expressed in the cracks that appear in a landscape devoid of all water.
10. Skyline, Old Kabul City and Old Kabul City
A blue-veiled woman, the colour of the sky, threads her way through the rubble of Kabul. It is impossible to tell at whose hand the city has been reduced to hollow, bombed-out shells, and indeed, this is irrelevant to the solitary figure moving like a displaced fragment of sky through the pale mud-brick. The pale, lifeless sky is reminiscent of a livid sheen of dust settling after bombing. I see much pathos in the fact that the women of Afghanistan, although they might be dressed in the colour of the sky seem to me to be searching fruitlessly for the blue that once was. In “Skyline, Old Kabul City” the vertical composition mocks the preoccupation amongst Western civilization of erecting tall buildings as a symbol of prosperity. “Old Kabul City”, with its horizontal emphasis, implies that destroyed streets such as these stretch endlessly in all directions.
11. Omeed
Omeed is the word for “hope” and the name of my youngest nephew, born in Australia. This is a portrait of my mother, and my recollections of her as protectress throughout my childhood. She is draped in both the wounded dove of peace and the flaming robes of warrior in the face of extreme peril. Her face dissolves into an image of a veiled pregnant woman holding a child. In this sense, the portrait is simultaneously that of my mother, my sister, my niece and the unborn child she carries, all contained within the one sheltering presence of my mother. Her external world is shattered, with only incongruous glimpses of blue sky appearing in empty windows. Time, in an environment such as this, is meaningless, symbolized by the fact that the blank face of the clock is devoid of hands.
12. Underworld
This painting revisits the theme of the massacre at Bamiyan, but makes a more general statement that women in Afghanistan inhabit an underworld, whilst all the time bearing up the immense weight of the sky. A tenuous flower of hope emerges from the darkness of repression and fear.
13. Dard
Walls of mountains are configured like architecture, enclosing a public place in a bombed-out village shown melting into the shape of tombs. Here, a sixteen-year-old girl was stoned to death for defying her father and refusing to marry a man sixty years her senior. This was a true story that remained impressed upon my imagination. I have shown the transformed body of the dead girl, sinking into a well of pain, parallelled by the deep pits formed by the shadows of those who witnessed the event. Her soul, in the form of a portal looking out onto the sea, bears witness to the fact that perhaps in death she is finally free of repression.
14. Foothold
This painting refers to my sense of alienation from both my culture of origin and my adoptive home in Australia. I fail to find a foothold on the red earth of Australia, finding myself suspended between two worlds. The self-portrait depicts myself as constrained by my cultural roots, encased in a shell of personal anguish. The sewn lips reveal that my voice and therefore my means of personal expression, has been silenced. My own ideas exist unexpressed in my head, symbolized by un-hatched eggs. Other details in the work – the sky shown as drapery, the landscape reduced to walls, the tenuous tendril springing from the second boot -- are all images of confinement and displacement, and my own need to deal with exile and alienation. My closed eye echoes the shape of the free bird my spirit might wish to be.