“PEOPLE NEED TO BE INTRODUCED TO NARRATIVES THAT DO NOT FEATURE AK-47S AND GRENADES”
SHAMSIA HASSANI, 29, Graffiti Artist, Afghanistan
Like a guerilla fighter, she plans the ambush well, always timing herself. She knows she cannot stay at a place for more than 15-20 minutes. It is important that she wear gender-neutral clothes. Armed with spray cans and stencils, she raids walls and starts painting a wall on the streets of Kabul. Before a crowd can gather, she retreats, managing to finish the mission—most of the time. And yes, she never paints war.
Afghanistan’s only street graffiti artist, Shamsia Hassani — named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers in 2014 — insists that painting the walls in Kabul is her way of introducing common people to art. “In the absence of art galleries, private shows and sculpture parks, how would they know that a parallel universe exists?”she asks, on the sidelines of Serendipity Arts Festival held in December last year in Goa. Awarded the Art Spectrum Award brought by Mojarto and Serendipity at the occasion, Hassani, a lecturer of Fine Arts at Kabul University was born in Tehran.
Ensuring that her work, much of which deals with women’s issues and everyday lives, stays away from war, the artist elaborates, “a country whose entire generation has seen only war should at get idea of other narratives,” she says.
Hassani, who always carries a sketchbook to draw her ideas on, confesses that she has thousands of sketches but not enough walls. “If I ask people to let me paint on their walls, they demand a portrait or a landscape,” she says.
Currently working on the theme of migration, the artist doesn’t mind that her art is complicated. “I say what I want, and people can interpret it in their own way. Spoon-feeding them would limit their imagination, no?”