A SCOTTISH university student has collected more than 150 art pieces to preserve the legacy of Afghanistan’s female artists.
Mahtab Karami, from the University of Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, is creating a digital archive of artwork made by Afghan women and girls.
Since regaining control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has restricted female artistic expression relentlessly.
Nearly two decades worth of drawings, paintings and other artwork by female artists have reportedly been destroyed or visibly removed.
Karami said: “Female artists were flourishing before the Taliban. However, women living in rural areas would still have faced issues if they had wanted to show off their art, even before the return of the Taliban and it is important to acknowledge that.
“But now women and girls are banned from attending schools. The Taliban do not care about providing a pathway for them to grow as artists. Because they are restricted from having a normal life, they cannot begin to think about creating artwork.”
Education for girls has been severely diminished – 1.4 million girls have been deliberately deprived of schooling in the past three years, reports Unesco.
Much of the freedom and reforms that women gained after the removal of the Taliban by coalition forces in 2001 has been dismantled.
Karami intends to catalogue 500 pieces of art, ensuring that the world can still observe the artists’ work regardless of their physical fate.
The archive is part of a larger research project, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, comparing the work of Afghanistan’s female artists with those from Iran, Iraq and Egypt and is supervised by Dr Helen Gorrill, a leading figure of the role of gender in contemporary art.
It will also incorporate the current work of Afghan artists living in exile.
Karami said: “I understand how women in Afghanistan may feel – frightened and scared – but many will also want to use art as a form of resistance to express themselves.
“Many of them want to show the world that they exist and have something to say. This project gives their work an opportunity to be seen and to endure.
"Interviewing the artists will allow people to learn more about their situation and what they face in Afghanistan. It is vital that these people and their paintings do not disappear from the history of art.”
