Afghanistan’s First Female Street Artist Brings Feminism To City Walls
XXII International Congress of Women in Legal Careers
April 5, 2016
International conference in Reykjavík 22–23 October, 2015. 100 years celebration of women’s suffrage
April 20, 2016Afghanistan’s First Female Street Artist Brings Feminism To City Walls
This work of street art was made by Shamsia Hassani, widely known as the first prominent woman street artist in Afghanistan. Hassani was born in 1988 in Tehran to Afghan parents, eventually moving to Kabul to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual art. She currently resides in Kabul, where she turns the city’s walls into colorful canvases that spread a message of peace and hope to her community.
A woman in a purple hijab sits playing the piano, a tear rolling down her cheek. She plays her solitary tune amongst a sea of blue skyscrapers, soaring above the cars that zoom beneath her unnoticed. This subject already wears her contradictions proudly — she is strong, she is vulnerable, she is graceful, creative, separate, sad. And yet, at least it seems, she calls out to no one, content to sit with her feelings and express herself creatively, freely, in peace.
