(1971, Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Lives and works in Kabul, Afghanistan)

 

What Histories Lay Beneath Our Feet?

Mixed Media Installation
2012

History is inherently complex, as it must deal with retrospection and interpretation in an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the narratives woven by it. What Histories Lay Beneath Our Feet? is an attempt to not only explore these historical narratives, but to disrupt them, reinterpret them, and provide a way to represent history as both real and imagined, creating an entirely new narrative that challenges the dominating metanarratives shaping our experience with, and understanding of, the past and the present.

 

Rooted in the artist’s own familial story of migration from Afghanistan to India and back again, the installation uses archaeological excavation (itself a highly politicized discipline), documentation, oral history, and imagination as forms of resistance against attempts in Afghanistan and elsewhere to impose certain historical interpretations upon us, and to explore history and politics (both colonial and contemporary) as a way to reimagine the possibilities of the past, the condition of the present, and therefore the potentialities of the future.

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