Shamsia Hassani
A young Afghan street artist is helping transform Kabul’s war-torn walls into colorful canvases filled with messages of peace, hope, and female empowerment! 28-year-old Shamsia Hassani, Afghanistan’s first female street artist, hopes to use her art to “cover all the bad memories of war from people’s minds with colors,” while at the same time promote women’s rights. “I want to show that women have returned to Afghan society with a new, stronger shape,” she says. “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.”
Hassani, who was born in Iran to Afghan refugee parents, moved to Afghanistan in 2005 to study Fine Art at Kabul University. She first started creating street art after a British graffiti artist named Chu held a workshop in Kabul in six years ago. Street art, she says, appealed to her because it is so accessible to the general public; “I think that graffiti is better because all people can see it and it is available for all time.” Although the Western world often considers graffiti a crime, in Afghanistan, where there are few art galleries but plenty of blank walls, graffiti and street art are embraced as an opportunity to make cities more beautiful.
There’s a difference between graffiti and street art aka murals, isn’t there?
Hassani, who also teaches graffiti at the University of Kabul, adds that “life as a female street artist poses particular problems when people who believe women should be in the home see her at work. “I worry all the time about security problems when I am in the street,” she says, “and maybe that something will happen, and I am afraid that I should leave.” But she is determined to continue spreading her art as a message of hope: “If I color over these bad memories, then I erase [war] from people’s minds. I want to make Afghanistan famous because of its art, not its war.”
In particular, Hassani intends to continue using her art to highlight women’s issues. “In the past, women were removed from society and they wanted women to stay only at home and wanted to forget about women,” she says. “Now, I want to use my paintings to remind people about women… I am painting them larger than life. I want to say that people look at them differently now.”
You can see more images of Hassani’s graffiti series on HuffPost — or follow her on Facebook at Shamsia Hassani.
The concept of ‘graffiti’ is not that easy to unpack, especially if you’re aiming to separate it from ‘street art’. The distinction mostly comes down to capitalism, private property, and classism; roughly speaking, street art that is both unsanctioned and created by lower-class individuals is ‘graffiti’ that cities in the West pay lots of money to erase and to prosecute the creators; street art that is either sanctioned *or* created by upper-class people with a well-known following (see: banksy) are ‘murals’ that are tolerated or embraced by the private citizens and governments responsible for the buildings so decorated.
There are arguments to be had about the necessity and propriety of that kind of distinction, and good points on either side. Where one falls in making the distinction tends to be dictated by how one thinks about issues around property, urbanisation, and segregation; the fact that some ‘graffiti’ is gang-related brings systems of power and policing into the mix, further complicating the issue. Just because most ‘graffiti’ is made by lower-class non-white people doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth reflexively defending, but it doesn’t mean it’s worth writing off, either.
In any case, Shamsia Hassani’s talent and bravery deserve to be recognised and celebrated, whatever labels one finds appropriate to affix to her work. While I doubt she is the *first* female Afghan street artist, she’s certainly the first I’ve ever heard of, and I hope she has a long career that serves as an inspiration to many more Afghan women and men.
Does it though? Does the distinction between graffiti and murals mostly come down to capitalism, private property, and classism? I know all that’s there, of course, but I’m not convinced it’s most of what’s there. I think aesthetic differences also play a big part. Murals can be killer gorgeous. Mere tagging isn’t usually all that gorgeous.
Some graffiti is just people writing their name all over things, and most of what I see locally is used to label minority groups with obscenities, usually related to female anatomy, and tell them to go back home. There is also street art around here, predominantly on the sides of buildings, and absolutely beautiful, that depicts scenes from history, mostly, or occasionally from nature. It beautifies what would otherwise be ugly; the graffiti just makes ugly gray human structures even uglier.
That’s certainly my view of it. And even street art I don’t find particularly beautiful I still see as street art as opposed to graffiti.
Post earthquake both graffiti and street art have blossomed in my city. Well one has blossomed and the other is spreading like a noxious weed.
The street art has been hugely varied, ranging from small scale and/or amateur, to huge in scale and gorgeous or imaginative. For instance, the rear wall (fly tower wall) of the Issac Theatre Royal was painted with a ballerina as seen from above. The wall of another building, exposed by the demolition of what had previously been a hardware store was painted bright yellow with a tool shadow board – brilliant and gave us all a much needed laugh.
On the other hand tagging abounds and the shits doing it don’t seem to care whether the building is a ruin, occupied or brand spanking new. Large scale tags painted over the facades of damaged building that are to be repaired simply adds tens of thousands to the cost of the refurbishment.
Hassani’s work is gorgeous and all the more remarkable for the culture and environment in which she is working. I have no doubt that both the activity and the subject matter places her at risk sadly.
I’m not sure that the categories of street art and graffitti are mutually exclusive. I’ve always understood that what makes something graffitti is that it’s illegal. Some street art is legal, some is not. Some that is illegal is overlooked if it’s improving something that is otherwise ugly, although that might be because the legal owners don’t care enough to get rid of it.
A local arts initiative, where I used to live had some hoardings alongside a building site painted (with permission). They had to paint it out when the festival was over. When I found the organisers restoring the hoardings to their usual colour, I asked why they didn’t just leave it. They said it was a compromise as one old man had objected, claiming that it would cause “licentiousness”. They had to promise an expiry date.