Culture and conflict: Kabuli art as public pedagogy

Abstract

Kabul is a city that has experienced years of war and devastation. Through the ruptures to culture, Kabuli¹ artists are using their art practice to rebuild their city. As a public pedagogy, the artworks produced in the streets of Kabul reflect the intersection of activism, education, and creative expression. This article will look at how two sources of public art, Shamsia Hassani and ArtLords, are creating transitional spaces within the city.² Through their art praxis, they make sites of contestation and deliberation. The incidental-ephemeral publics that encounter them and their work as they pass are invited to engage with the work and the process of art making. The site, thus, employs visual and performative tools to nurture discursive moments in which citizens can engage with artists about the future of their city and the construction of identity. The article will present the aspirations of these street artists and their art practice, arguing that it is a form of public pedagogy. They reflect the hopes and fears of the inhabitants who simultaneously love and fear their city.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Dr. Lucy Fiske, Dr. Chrisanthi Giotis, Cale Bane, and Ferdinand Dickel for their considered feedback and support.

Declaration of interest

No conflicts of interest

Notes

1 Kabuli refers to people from Kabul. For a detailed definition of Kabuli, see Issa and Kohistani (2007, pp. 56–57).

2 ArtLords projects in Kabul can be viewed through their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ArtLordsofAfghanistan/) or their website (https://www.ArtLords.co/). Shamsia is part of a group called Berang Arts. Her works can be viewed on the Berang Arts Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/BerangArts/) or her own website (http://www.shamsiahassani.net/)

3 Since the global Covid-19 pandemic, Shamsia has moved her work primarily to indoors.

4 This lineage spans the Paleolithic era murals found in southern France, the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Diego Rivera’s mural art which sparked the mural movement in Mexico in the twentieth century, the African American civil rights mural movement, and so forth.

5 This has also been applied to different mediums of creative expression. Gershon (2010), for example, argues that musicians are public intellectuals because music permeates our lives, it is inherently public, and because it contains knowledge.

6 Mouffe (2013) defines hegemonic practices as, “Those practices of articulation although, which a certain order is created and the meaning of social institutions fixed” (p. 210).

7 Istanbullus is Pamuk’s word for residents of Istanbul, much like the use of the word Kabuli for people residing (or originating) in Kabul.

8 I concede that this is an artificial binary and need not be simply oppositional. Rather, culture, as a dynamic and resilient source of values, often adapts to capture the zeitgeist of society.

9 Narayan (1997) refers to this as the “colonialist stance,” defined as “a Western tendency to portray Third-World contexts as dominated by the grip of ‘traditional practices’ that insulate these contexts from the effects of historical change” (pp. 48–49).

10 Pedagogy of the public is comparable to Paulo Freire’s conscientization (Biesta, 2014, p. 22).

11 My use of the aporetic space is inspired by its use by Burdick et al. (2014), who refer to Derrida’s position on aporia as representing a productive space and the potential to know between knowing and not knowing, between question and answer (pp. 1,3,4). I use it here to reflect the liminal and interstitial spaces between the will to create amidst the fear of chaos. It is art’s functioning within aporetic space that can make us uncomfortable enough to question.

12 The reduction of truly public spaces has been the focus of much works (Biesta, 2012; Giroux 2003; Harvey, 2008; Marquand, 2004; Sennett, 1993). Bauman (2001), for example, identifies the incursions of the private sphere upon an ever shrinking public.

13 Giroux (2004) does express the role of culture as “crucial terrain for theorizing and realizing the political as an articulation and intervention into the social, a space in which politics is pluralized, recognized as contingent, and open to many formations” (p. 78).

14 See also O’Malley and Roseboro (2010) who refer to this as the “pedagogical hinge.”

15 See Christensen-Scheel (2018) who, in her discussion of the Tate Exchange, suggests that art may have its own public (p. 115).

16 Fraser points out that counterpublics can be either benevolent or malevolent but that they nevertheless “help expand discursive space” (1990, p. 67).

Additional information

Funding

This article is not funded.

Notes on contributors

Bilquis Ghani

Bilquis Ghani works at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at the University of Technology Sydney. She was also the co-founder of the Refugee Art Project. Her research interests lie in the intersection of art and academia, as well as decolonial theory and the processes of epistemicide in the global South. This paper comes out of her doctoral thesis, currently under examination.