Category: Events

What would the dust of Afghanistan sound like if it were music? How is a burqa transformed into canvas through oil paint? What stories do a pair of shoes recount in the aftermath of displacement? These questions are explored in an unprecedented showcase of art, writing, film, and scholarship entitled, Fragmented Futures: Afghanistan 100 Years Later, opening at ReflectSpace Gallery on November 16, 2019. 

Co-sponsored by The Afghan American Artists & Writers Association, Fragmented Futures will run from November 16, 2019 through January 12, 2020, and is co-curated by Gazelle Samizay and Helena Zeweri of AAAWA and Ara & Anahid Oshagan.

The year 2019 marks the centennial of some of the first attempts to engineer a “modern Afghan state” following the third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. Attempts by foreign powers to incorporate Afghanistan into the economic and political life of the international community had mixed results for the country and its people. Political upheaval was accompanied by the development of progressive agendas around gender equality, civic life, and the media. In the words of photographer Rafi Samizay, “The result of so many invasions and foreign occupations is a culture made of a patchwork of contradictory traits…Traces of the past remain in every citizen and in the physical environment. It is precisely these residual paradoxes that mirror the mixed historic legacy.” Using the centennial as a guiding theme, Fragmented Futures seeks to address the ongoing consequences of foreign intervention, which are key to understanding Afghanistan’s current struggles to be self-sufficient. 

The exhibit expands the conversation beyond depictions of Afghanistan and its diaspora as either simply victims of imperial agendas or completely independent of them. Rather, Fragmented Futures sheds light on how people’s everyday aspirations were interrupted, transformed, and reborn in both the diaspora and in an ever-changing Afghanistan. This is illustrated in Yusuf Misdaq’s installation, as “ghostly voices of youth from the past echo through in the form of spliced and affected spoken-word interviews.”

Several artists and writers have been invited to contribute to a zine created especially for the exhibit, bringing together art, short stories, essays, poetry, and scholarship. The zine serves as a unique creative artifact illustrating the vibrant public life and community building that takes place in the Afghan diaspora, while the exhibit as a whole critically engages with the ongoing legacies of empire and war in the Afghan community.

Artists and Writers

The artists in Fragmented Futures exhibition: Elyas Alavi, Fazila Amiri, Hangama Amiri, Farhad Azad, Sabrina Barekzai, Muheb Esmat, Shiraz Fazli, Zuhal Feraidon, Johanna-Maria Fritz, Mariam Ghani, Shamsia Hassani, Reza Hazare, Jim Huylebroek, Yusuf Misdaq, Aman Mojadidi, Sahar Muradi, Laimah Osman, Sara Rezaie, Gazelle Samizay, Rafi Samizay, and Samea Shanori.

Writers and artists in Fragmented Futures zine: Leeza Ahmady, Arash Azizzada, Mojib Ghaznawi, Mehdia Hassan, Brian Higbee, Seelai Karzai, Hanna Kherzai, Jamil Kochai, Omar Mizdaq, Deeva Momand, Neda Olomi, Mohammad Sabir Sabir, Susan Saleh, Malahat Zhobin, Sara Zhobin, and Wazina Zondon.

About AAAWA

The Afghan American Artists & Writers Association is a North American-based Afghan women-led collective that aims to give artists and writers in the Afghan diaspora a platform to feature their work to a broad audience through community forums, exhibitions, creative workshops, and public commentaries. AAAWA seeks to amplify work that critically engages mainstream U.S. discourses around Afghanistan, where Afghan voices are either routinely ignored or reduced to cultural tropes.

About ReflectSpace

ReflectSpace is an inclusive exhibition gallery designed to explore and reflect on major human atrocities, genocides, civil rights violations, and other social injusticies. Immersive in conception, ReflectSpace is a hybrid space that is both experiential and informative, employing art, technology, and interactive media to reflect on the past and present of Glendale’s communal fabric and interrogate current-day global human rights issues.

About Library Arts & Culture

Glendale’s Library, Arts & Culture Department began in 1907 and includes six neighborhood libraries as well as the Brand Library & Art Center, housed in the historic 1904 mansion of Glendale pioneer Leslie C. Brand, and the Central Library, a 93,000 square foot center for studying, learning and gathering. For more information call Library, Arts & Culture at 818-548-2030 or see the website www.GlendaleLAC.org.

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Exhibition Dates                                  Nov 16, 2019 – Jan 12, 2020

Address                                               222 E. Harvard Street, Glendale, CA 91205

Opening Reception                             Saturday, November 16, 2019 5-7 pm (featuring live musical performance and reading)                                              

Closing, film & Panel Discussion        Sunday, January 12, 2020, 4-6 pm (featuring Mariam Ghani’s What We Left Unfinished and Fazila Amiri’s “Unknown Artist”)

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In June 2019, Gazelle Samizay and Helena Zeweri led a workshop on creative outlets for expression at the Afghan American Conference at UC-Irvine. The workshop aimed to facilitate a space where participants could think out loud with each other about how to channel their strengths as artists, activists, writers, academics, or advocates to bring the Afghan diaspora into public spaces in innovative ways. It is often challenging for Afghan Americans to bring their whole intersectional identities into either professional or creative spaces. They are oftentimes told to channel their strengths toward professional and educational mobility in place of more creative projects through which they can express themselves politically and culturally. In this session, we discussed how to demarginalize non-normative forms of personhood within public creative expression. Participants thought about how creative work can feed into public engagement and social justice in relation to the Afghan diaspora and beyond.

In March 2018, Gazelle Samizay and Helena Zeweri led a workshop at the Afghan American Conference in New York called, “How Culture Matters: Tools for Social Justice through Self-Empowerment.” Participants discussed alternative frameworks within which to (re) activate the notion of ‘culture’ in the struggle for collective care and equality. We began from the premise that there is a shared quality to growing up Afghan in America, shaped by a common set of political, social, and historical conditions. At the same time, how this shared experience manifests in the pasts and presents of different individuals is distinct according to race, class, gender, and other categories of difference.  Shared learnings from ancestors past and kin of the present, have made an impact on different individuals in different ways. However, because of the demand (from our communities, our families, and the state) to fit our identities within scripts of Afghanness, we have not been able to properly filter which teachings enable us to participate in struggles for equality and justice, and which need to be discarded because they are antithetical to these struggles. 

While avoiding the pitfalls of community insularity, cultural essentialism, and identity politics, we discussed how different cultural norms and forms have both enabled and hindered our participation in broader political and social movements. 

“Afghan Americans: Ten Years Later” took place on October 7, 2011 at the Mandragoras Art Space in Long Island City, New York and was sponsored by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and 10 Years and Counting. The event fell on the 10^th anniversary of the US-led war in Afghanistan, and brought together people from throughout the Afghan diaspora in New York as well as the local LIC community. It was a multimedia interactive exhibit featuring live musical and spoken word performances. The event was meant to show how Afghan Americans use creative expression to critique US policy in Afghanistan and its ongoing war. We explored the entangled histories of both countries, and the role of the diaspora in political and social critique.

The event featured live poetry readings, documentaries, and musical performances. Wazhmah Osman, who is a filmmaker and professor of media communications at Temple University screened her film “Postcards from Tora Bora” which chronicled her and her families’ return to Afghanistan shortly after 2001, and the disorientation of that experience.

“A New Day: Readings by Afghan and Iranian American Writers” was one of AAAWA’s first events, and marked the first time we collaborated with Iranian American writers. Featuring live readings of poetry and short stories, it took place in March 2010 at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York, right at the cusp of the Afghan and Iranian New Year, or Nowroz. At the time, the event was unprecedented in how it brought together different writers in the diaspora who as of yet had still been at the margins.

The event also served as a fundraiser for the Committee to Protect Journalists in Iran and Afghanistan. Additionally, there was a panel discussion about negotiating gender as a writer.

In October 2009, AAAWA hosted its first event, “Witness to War: Afghan Poetry and Narratives” at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. The event celebrated the launch of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press), co-edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi. The event featured readings from Afghan American writers who identify as survivors of war, refugees, repatriates, and those who remained in exile or resettled in the US. Featured writers included: Masood Kamandy, Naheed Elyasi, Zohra Saed, Afifa Yusufi, Sedika Mojadidi, and Sahar Muradi.