A Spotlight on Female Artists in Afghanistan: Graffiti-Artist Shamsia Hassani

retrieved from @shamsiahassani on Instagram, posted on Aug 15 2021

captioned, “maybe it is because our wishes have grown in a black pot.”

Against an encroaching darkness and before a menacing opponent stands a long-lashed challenger in screaming colour. In her work, Shamsia Hassani, the first female graffiti artist in Afghanistan, spray-paints womanhood across the walls of a male dominant society. Her work featuring Afghan women— figures who are “proud, loud, and can bring positive changes,” according to Hassani— reflects the unrelenting nature of its muse and continues to crop up on the streets of Afghanistan amidst the August 2021 Taliban occupation of Kabul, the nation’s capital.

“So, in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country,” Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist in exile, articulated. Currently active, Hassani paints murals in response to developments in Afghanistan and carves out a space for the Afghan woman’s experience in mottled city-walls. The Taliban regime’s “near-total exclusion of women from public life,” as condensed by Encyclopaedia Britannica, is echoed in the inner thoughts of women in Afghanistan. “Maybe it is because our wishes have grown in a black pot,” Hassani captioned a mural posted to her Instagram on August 15th, 2021, the day the Taliban captured Kabul. The work contextualises the realisation that one’s ambitions are predetermined to be suppressed to the Afghan woman’s experience but doesn’t depict it with a power to quash out hope. The Afghan woman retains her bright colours and glowing ambitions but also characterises the hurt of watching one’s home become hostile to their identity.

retrieved from @shamsiahassani on Instagram, posted on Aug 27 2021

captioned, “Explosion at Kabul airport broke my heart, they killed people

who wanted to save themselves from Taliban...nightmare never ends...”

As the Taliban’s hold over the nation sets in, Hassani’s works reflect a woman whose chin isn’t set as high and whose expression is furrowed with worry. Her August 27th post in response to the explosion at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, which killed over 95 people and injured 150 more, superimposes splatters of blood over an Afghan woman who turns her despairing face away and cradles her arms.

retrieved from The New York Times’, “On the streets and at funerals, Afghans mourn victims of the airport attack,”

shot by Victor J. Blue for The New York Times and published on Aug 27 2021

The conflict between the violence and hope in the piece models a larger tension between the Taliban regime and the people – especially the women – than it governs. The woman in the artwork is struck by red even as she turns away and the Afghans who are opposed to the regime are involved in the pain even as they resist. It also brings to light the tension between individuality and community, as the fresh, blue-patterned identity of the woman is encroached upon by red splatters of aggression.

Through her artwork, Shamsia Hassani provides insight into the human experience under Taliban’s occupation of Afghanistan. But as time under the regime progresses, her works shift off the streets and onto smaller pieces of paper.

retrieved from @shamsiahassani on Instagram, posted on Sep 1 2021

Written by: Anushka Roy

Edited by: Ishani Patil