In Photos: Afghanistan’s First Female Graffiti Street Artist

Shamsia Hassani is painting the walls of Kabul’s street with her feisty, feminist artworks.

Living in a world full of images, it is often easy to forget how potent they can be. How much power they wield over our perception of ideas, places and people and just how much they can influence the narrative around any issue. Think Afghanistan, and the first thing that pops into the mind are images of a country ravaged by war and violence. A country where a generation of people have made conflict their everyday reality.

But Shamsia Hassani, Afghanistan’s first female graffiti artist is trying to change that. Through her feminist, textured and profound graffiti works in the streets of Kabul, she is trying to ‘cover all bad memories of war from people’s mind with colours.’

Shamsia was born in Tehran in Iran in 1988 and moved to Kabul to pursue her bachelors and masters degree in visual arts. Through Shamsia’s artworks, she attempts to engage with the question of the Afghani woman in an urban space. The theme becomes even more interesting because her artworks are not private canvases but graffiti-pieces scrawled on public walls.

In an interview to the Art Radar Journal, she explained the women in her artworks,

I have changed my images to show the strength of women, the joy of women. In my artwork, there is lots of movement. I want to show that women have returned to Afghan society with a new, stronger shape. It’s not the woman who stays at home. It’s a new woman. A woman who is full of energy, who wants to start again. I am painting them larger than life.

Shamsia Hassani

Graffiti in Afghanistan is treated differently than in European nations, where the art form is seen to be anti-establishment and is often termed illegal. However, being a woman, Shamsia was unable to access the streets as she pleased and so she started started a technique called ‘Dreaming Graffiti’. In this technique she would take large prints of Kabul street corners and using them as a canvas, paint over them in her studio.

Shamsia is also known for her 3D work where she creates stunning piece of graffiti in everyday environment, which looks almost ethereal in its dimension.

Of her series ‘Secret’, out of which one artwork you can see below, Shamsia told The Huffington Post,

I began this series by outlining the figures of women in burqas with straight lines and sharp edges, conveying a feeling of strength. Still, I wanted to show the secret beneath the burqa, which is that there is a real person inside. I wanted to remove the restrictions on women and the guitar represents her ability to speak up and express herself. 

In fact, musical instruments are a recurring motif in her work and can be seen as abstractions for freedom of thought, expression and movement for Afghani women. This artwork is from her ‘Birds Have No Nation’ series.

Shamsia teaches graffiti at the University of Kabul, apart from exhibiting her work around the world. Hassani is currently the artist-in-residence at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

(Sources: The Huffington Post, Kabul Art Project, Art Radar Journal)