When she saw it, she couldn't believe it. The impact was so strong that she forgot where she was going. The taxi driver who was taking her, and whom she had forced to stop out of sheer amazement, honked impatiently, but she couldn't close the door, standing there in the middle of the road, oblivious to the noise, horrified. She raised her phone and took a picture. On that wall in the center of Kabul, Shamsia Hassani had created her greatest work. A whole day of work, a long journey to obtain the building owner's permissions. This time she wanted to go big. The painting took the form of a girl rising above the front facade, eyes closed under the hijab; on the side, piano keys flowed. But now, there was a male figure in front of the artist. The piano had turned into a stack of books.
"It had the same hands, the same body, but they had painted a man's face over it," she recalls, her voice breaking. "I suppose that's why it's possible that it's the only one of my Afghan works that still exists."
Shamsia Hassani prefers that no one knows where she lives or exactly what her situation is. She doesn't even activate the Zoom camera. She apologizes, she is used to taking all precautions. She is an Afghan refugee in a safe place, let's leave it at that. She has always been an Afghan refugee, actually. "It's a sad identity. Trying to build a home in a place you don't feel a special connection to is very tough," she describes.
The first - and probably the only - Afghan graffiti artist managed to escape the Taliban, but her art remained there, trapped on the walls of a city ravaged by endless war. She knows nothing about her murals, if any still peek out from under the rubble. She has hardly any news of her family, her parents and her sister, an artist like her, who couldn't leave; nor of many friends scattered around the world, in a diaspora too diffuse to maintain a friendship. The memory becomes hazy, fades so much that sometimes she feels that all those people only live in her mind. Some must have died, for sure, and she will never know. The streets she once filled with color bravely are now just traces shouting in code in her new designs. She always paints the same woman, always alone, always with her eyes closed, always without a mouth. But always with much to say.
The Spanish sustainable thought magazine Anoche tuve un sueño awarded her its International Optimistic Committed to Freedom of Expression Award a few weeks ago, which seeks to recognize projects and people working for social progress and with the ambition to protect human rights, from responsibility and duties. However, her peculiar personal situation made it impossible for Shamsia to come in person to receive it.
This young artist's migratory story begins even before she was born. Her parents, originally from Kandahar, fled the Soviet invasion in the 80s and settled in Iran. She was born there in 1988 and grew up with the uncomfortable feeling of never being well received. "I was so young that I didn't understand anything, but I was aware that I didn't have the same rights as my schoolmates. I was different," she recalls. When she reached university, she was told that higher education was off-limits for Afghan refugees, and the whole family returned to their home country.
Shamsia always remembers herself painting. Art was, from a very young age, her little corner of freedom in a very unwelcoming environment for a girl. So as soon as she set foot in Kabul, she enrolled in Fine Arts. There, it was incomprehensible for a woman to have artistic interests, it was insulting even, but at least it wasn't illegal. "Before coming to Afghanistan, I only knew what I had seen on TV. Nothing good, of course. So when the time came to leave Iran, I experienced it with great pain," she says. "However, as soon as I landed in Kabul, I was overwhelmed by a wonderful feeling: I finally belonged somewhere. I was returning to my roots despite never having been there, and those roots embraced me. It was incredible, I can't explain it in words."
"I'm not looking to change the world with my murals but to provoke a moment of reflection, hope, compassion, whatever feeling. That's enough for me"
Shamsia's voice, joyful in the memory of that first impact, is covered with a veil of sadness when she returns to the happy university days, first as a student, then as a teacher, where the colorful paintings brought brightness to the general atmosphere. "The government was different then, but the Taliban were always there, everywhere, and the attacks were constant. The country was living in a kind of fake recess, but the reality was that they didn't let us live in peace," she says. Fear was the general feeling, but hope subdued it within the classroom walls. Art became, once again, Shamsia's little corner of freedom, and she passed this on to her students, a generation eagerly awaiting a brighter future. "Amid all those explosions and bombings, countless good things happened. It was the best time of my life."
In that difficult balance between the joy of youth and the fear of a fatal destiny, Shamsia Hassani attended a master class by the well-known British urban artist Chu, a regular collaborator of the mysterious Banksy. And once again, that feeling overwhelmed her: "I had never heard the word graffiti in my life, I couldn't even imagine that art could be created on a street wall. But it was the answer to all my creative concerns." A door had opened that would never close, and she wanted to know everything: the technique, the tricks to avoid being seen, the story behind an artistic genre absolutely foreign to her culture.
The definitive eureka moment came when she finished her first piece on a wall and truly understood what she had done. "In Afghanistan, art practically doesn't exist. There are no big galleries, exhibitions, or museums accessible to the population. People don't know art, and they don't like it, or maybe precisely they don't like it because they don't know it, so graffiti gave me the opportunity to take art to the streets. It doesn't require managing an entrance or going anywhere, and besides, it's free and for everyone," explains Shamsia, regaining a positive tone. "I'm not looking to change the world with my murals but to create a pause in the minds of passersby and provoke a moment of reflection, hope, compassion, whatever they feel. That moment alone is enough for me."
She started slowly, night after night, with modest-sized designs. She calculated that she shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes per piece, or things could get tricky, and she resigned herself to simple strokes. "The most satisfying creative moment for me comes with the final meticulousness, when the bulk of the work is already drawn, and you indulge in the details that finish perfecting the piece. I had to give up on that for safety," she recounts. She carried a small, light backpack to be able to run if needed. It was impossible to carry a ladder to give volume to her works, and she had to make do with a few spray cans: a couple of shades of blue, white, black, and not much else.
"I suppose if I had painted landscapes, they would have rejected me less, but I would have betrayed myself as an artist"
"I never took too many risks because I didn't want to endanger my parents, who had given me an education and allowed me to leave home to paint. When you're young, all that adrenaline is very exciting, but the truth is I was very scared," admits Shamsia. "In Afghanistan, it's not even normal for a girl to stand on the street, imagine if she starts painting a wall. They looked at me, insulted me, harassed me, and I learned to concentrate under that constant siege, to make it tolerable, but always assessing my safety and that of my loved ones. I never went to paint at a demonstration, no matter how appealing the idea was."
Every time she stood in front of a new wall, hidden under the light urban cover, a sensation came over her, a message as if from the universe: "Don't do it." And then, she looked around, assessed the risk, and moved forward... or not. Paranoia was often her worst enemy. "I remember once, after drawing the first line, I heard a motor noise. A police car full of soldiers passed by me, with their weapons at the ready. They didn't say anything, didn't even look at me, and drove on, but I couldn't continue. That line remained there as a testament to my terror," she asserts.
The girl who stars in her paintings has no name, doesn't resemble anyone, is always the same person but not even a girl as such. She could be anyone. "I wanted to represent a human being, and a woman came out because I suppose for some, it's not so clear that a woman is a human being," she explains. That character is, she says, the actress she directs in different scenes, in different roles that tell diverse stories but with a common thread. "She was born to provide a different perspective on the idea of art in my land. I sought to create something new, something that didn't exist before and wasn't familiar to them to provoke thought. I guess if I had painted landscapes, they would have rejected me less, but I would have betrayed myself as an artist."
Her protagonist, however, is anything but static and represents the exact and colorful embodiment of her author's mental flow. "I think in images, it's like my personal alphabet," she explains. Just as the girl without a mouth is not necessarily a girl, the instruments that often accompany her have little or nothing to do with music. "They are her voice. If you notice, they are always distorted, as if they don't exist in the real world. They take the form she decides, the one that allows her to speak." Some of her designs also trace verses in Dari, the language of Afghan refugees: "'The water can return to a dry river, but what about the fish that died?'."
Time has also taken its toll on the representation of that woman proposed by Shamsia, forced by misunderstandings that she now avoids at all costs. "At first, the girl wore a burka. Later, she switched to a hijab."
"My paintings covered bullet holes in walls where the only decoration was aggressive political posters"
"Before the Taliban ruled, I knew many women who were happy to wear the burka. I asked them if they thought their lives would improve if they took it off, and they were very clear that no, it was a part of their culture and not a bad thing. I know it's not easy to understand that a woman is content with something that limits her freedom, but the fact is that beneath those garments is a woman who lives, feels, and acts, and my art can't change the situation but can show the human being and make it strong, with more defined shapes and broad shoulders. A woman in a burka can educate herself, a woman in a burka can have freedom, a woman in a burka can be happy. Clothing is not always the problem, and with my paintings, I return them to society in a way," reasons Shamsia. But not everyone understood her idea. "I was accused of supporting the burka or being happy about its existence. I had never thought about it from that perspective, but I changed the attire of my character and closed her eyes, showed her expressionless, pale. Nothing good will happen to her, she will just be a girl taking off the burka."
The closed eyes were born as a protest, there was nothing to see in that patriarchal society in perpetual war with itself, but then they came to life. The artist began to contemplate how what that face conveyed varied depending on the moment she found herself as a spectator. It could be sad, happy, worried, or euphoric. "It was finally a mirror in which anyone could see themselves reflected." It also served a more mundane purpose, a kind of redemption towards her homeland, which she knew as a gray and desolate place and ended up filling it with happiness despite everything. "My paintings covered bullet holes in walls where the only decoration was aggressive political posters and colorless. When they started circulating on social media, I thought my graffiti could somehow change the image people had of Afghanistan," she states, and something breaks in her voice. "Home is like a mother, you love her despite everything. Art changes people's mentality, and people can change society."
Some have dubbed Shamsia Hassani as "the Afghan Banksy." She appreciates the trust and acknowledges that she is still far from being established. "I would love to meet him, a while ago I went to an exhibition of his in London and fantasized thinking that he was really there, only neither of us realized." The increasingly uphill life of this urban artist now traverses a peaceful plain despite the absences, but she has learned to focus on the present: "The past is always in black and white, and so is the future. What happened, happened, and cannot be changed, and tomorrow is too scary. Life is only today."