Born and raised in a family of Afghan intellectuals, Rada Akbar has been lucky to be a woman with access to an education, the possibility to generate her own discourse and to demonstrate against the religious and political laws of her country. Being aware of her privilege, Akbar has focused her artistic work on showing all layers of the women of her culture, who are currently experiencing one of the most repressive moments in her country, after the Taliban coup in August 2021. The artist opened an exhibition in Spain for the first time yesterday, Invisible Captivity, which can be seen until March 31 at the Imaginart Gallery.
“The oppression that women experience in Afghanistan goes far beyond the veil,” the artist forcefully stated in an interview with La Vanguardia. “What the Taliban want is to control the bodies of women and that they are always at their service,” explained the artist. “In this process of control, women are progressively deprived of all their rights, until they end up becoming invisible.” The feminist discourse and protest art of Rada Akbar have made her an enemy of the Taliban and with the 2021 coup, the artist had to take refuge in France to save her life. Her intention is not to allow “the war against women that is being waged in Afghanistan to go unnoticed by the rest of the world.”
“In the photographs that I present, I want to capture the reality of the imaginary about women that exists in Afghanistan.” For this reason, the artist has painted on the faces of the photographed women, who appear covered by the veil, a fingerprint built from phrases from the Koran that explain how women should be treated according to God’s commandments. “The Qur’an reduces us to objects for men. That’s why I wanted to represent women as statues and capture how their identity is based on what religion says about them,” Akbar explained. The images are in black and white because, according to the author, the strict laws that restrict women take away their will to live, “take away the color of their lives.”
According to the artist, religion is the excuse to promote a policy and a culture that directly threatens the freedoms of women and several examples can be seen in her exhibition. Women have to wear the burqa in public, a man can have up to four wives at the same time, women cannot go out alone, they cannot carry out activities without their husband’s permission, they do not have access to education and they are doomed to superstitions and a magical imagination, also controlled by men. Also, before the law, a woman is equal to half a man.
Why has the situation for women in Afghanistan now regressed so drastically? “Because men have never stopped being interested in dominating us,” claimed the activist. “Men have seen what women with an education and their own way of thinking are capable of. We are unstoppable. But why are they so afraid of us?” This is the big question for Akbar.
“The civil war emptied Afghanistan of intellectuals and, since then, the culture has become very radical in a conservative sense,” said the artist. Akbar also points out the hypocrisy of the Western countries that throw their hands up over the situation in Afghanistan. “If the Taliban have come to power in my country, it is because the United States and all its allies have wanted to.”
For Rada Akbar, the most important thing is to show the real situation of women in her country in order to awaken maximum solidarity throughout the world. “When the rights of women are violated in another country, they are also violating my rights as a woman,” she stressed. “In the same way that Afghan women now live in a very difficult situation, this could happen in any other country. The United States has banned the right to abortion and continues to defend that it is the country of freedom,” Akbar reflected. For this reason, the artist advocates for a feminism for all women of all cultures and of all origins.
