Special correspondence.
Afghan artist Kubra Khademi enters the room, unrolls a spool of golden thread and begins weaving a web over a pile of jackets strewn on the floor. She ignores the audience watching her, focused on her creation. The performance From armor to vests accompanies the exhibition “First but not last time in America” at the Lambert collection, for the duration of the Festival d’Avignon. Kubra Khademi is also the author of the poster for the 76e edition of the Festival, a column of naked young women gazing at the horizon.
Freedom from sexualization
Far from the controversy that accuses the artist of promoting pedophilia, Kubra Khademi defends committed art, inspired by Afghan culture and featuring free bodies. The frescoes exhibited in Avignon free themselves from any sexualization of the female body. The lines are clean, the artist has chosen plain ocher and blue gouaches, and the silhouettes are reminiscent of Mongolian miniatures. Kubra Khademi rehabilitates women at the heart of mythological stories: in the fresco The Great Battletwo young women fight a dragon with their golden swords.
The swords are gold, just like the thread woven on the jackets or the verses of Afghan poetry that escape from their frame in one of the rooms of the museum. Gold has a special value in the eyes of the visual artist, it represents the beauty of Persian art. She is also inspired by traditional poetry and popular poetry called “under the navel”, highlighting erotic verses.
Her body as an artistic and political tool
It is in the second part of the exhibition that the artist presents works with assumed eroticism. A series of photos show Kubra Khademi wearing an Afghan man’s outfit, alongside his ex-companion, the American Daniel Pettrow, in a suit and tie. They photograph themselves against a backdrop representing mountainous nature, parodying Afghan photographic studios. In some photos, they stand in sexually explicit positions, with Kubra Khademi carrying a weapon, deceptively threatening.
However, the artist does not limit himself to representing silhouettes, but uses his body as an artistic and political tool. In 2015, for Armor, she had taken to the streets of Kabul wearing armor emphasizing the female forms. Following the reactions of passers-by, she had to cut short her performance, then, victim of harassment and daily threats, go into exile in France.
in performance From armor to vests, the artist has this time decided to question the violence of war. Khaki vests are the universal symbol of soldiers’ jackets. Scattered on the ground, they seem to have been abandoned on the battlefield after the fight. For Kubra Khademi, weapons are responsible for war, for its violence. The gold thread that connects the waistcoats is reminiscent of sewing, a job reserved for women, who only have access to traditional arts, sheltered from outside gazes. For the artist, to sew up is also to heal, to make something new. She therefore gives hope that after the war, in times of peace, women will have the space to think about a life that is free and equal to that of men.
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