Biography

I began painting as an amateur in 2000, when I was in Islamabad, Pakistan. I continued drawing after returning to Afghanistan in 2002. I then enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts of Kabul University in 2003 and completed my BA in Painting/Drawing in 2007.

I also became a member of the Centre for Contemporary Arts of Afghanistan in 2004. In 2006 other female artists and I established the Centre for Women Artists in Kabul, with the aim of introducing contemporary Afghan women’s arts to a wide audience and advancing it locally through the commissioning of new artworks, and to also serve as a platform for emergent artistic practices.

I have participated in various art exhibitions inside and outside Afghanistan. As part of an Afghanistan female artists’ group, I exhibited my works in Berlin, Germany in 2008. I have also attended many training workshops on photography, painting, and documentary film making. In September 2014, together with a group of other female artists, I established the Shamama Art Gallery, a gathering place that engages the community and promotes the arts as a cornerstone of community creativity and development.  I was a full time art teacher at School Of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), an Afghan-led, US financed, boarding school for girls, the first and only one of its kind, from 2016 to 2020. SOLA was forced to shut down in August, 2020 and now operates in exile in Rwanda.

Most of my works are centered on women; their identities and social roles are recurring themes in my paintings. Most importantly, my work explores, why is it that women are made to realize gender differences when aiming to find their place in the society. My goal is to remind the viewer of the limitations and the “silence” imposed on women that they have inherited historically. These long periods of silence carry unspoken messages and are never empty of content. My work is meant to partially break this silence through artwork.  I have lived in societies where individual freedoms have not been understood and defined clearly; let alone becoming the consensual basis of social practice.

Informed by women’s social position and particularly the limitations imposed on them, as well as an energy that is hidden behind an urge to practice self-emancipation and freedom, my work is a constant struggle embellished by subtle movements between social and personal themes.