Design and Art Australia Online

Khadim Ali’s miniature painting work explores complex moral themes of good and evil, set in the anarchic civil war in Afghanistan, where ethnic and religious bigotry are means to an end. Khadim Ali interweaves past and present symbols — including the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas sculpted by his Hazara ancestors — to explore coexisting layers of the experience of intervention and religious extremism in a world distorted by warped ideologies.

Khadim Ali’s miniature painting work explores complex moral themes of good and evil, set in the anarchic civil war in Afghanistan, where ethnic and religious bigotry are means to an end. Khadim Ali interweaves past and present symbols — including the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas sculpted by his Hazara ancestors — to explore coexisting layers of the experience of intervention and religious extremism in a world distorted by warped ideologies.

The Force of Forgetting: 'From the beginning of the history of Afghanistan, the Hazara people have been persecuted and massacred and have been living under sectarian, ethnic oppressive regimes. ...The force of forgetting doesn’t mean to forget a history of pain, but the inability to express that memory. For this we need a silent artistic language to speak about these suppressed memories.’ Khadim Ali, Karachi, 2011

The difficulties faced by artists in Afghanistan will be dramatically on view in the exhibition The Haunted Lotus: Contemporary Art from Kabul. This war-torn country is now known better for anarchy than aesthetics.

The difficulties faced by artists in Afghanistan will be dramatically on view in the exhibition The Haunted Lotus: Contemporary Art from Kabul. This war-torn country is now known better for anarchy than aesthetics.