Great Throughts Treasury

"That’s part of what makes his death [Bin Laden] so confusing. Nothing will change here, yet he was an actor in the “global theatre” that’s been created (by him and Bush) through such an abstract concept as the War on Terror. Now one of the protagonists is dead, leaving the audience – or at least me – looking in disbelief at the space he occupied. In another sense it’s deeply personal. For the last ten years at least, if not longer when you include the years he spent doing jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets – that’s 25 percent of my life, he’s been a force in my life. So, seeing him channel-surfing with the ski cap and grey beard made me feel almost sympathetic towards him. He had probably become more enthralled by the role he was playing in that theater than the actual impact of his actions. The role of a lifetime, I guess."

"My practice is based on personal experiences intertwined with curatorial and academic research in cultural studies. Having grown up as an American citizen of Afghan heritage, in a world that is simultaneously globalized and fractured, my work combines traditional storylines and postmodern, often parodist, narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics, conflict, cultural traditions (be they real, imagined, invented), as well as the push to and resistance against modernization. Continuously exploring what I call the “geography of self,” I travel through both mental and physical landscapes, intentionally blurring and merging the lines between them, as well as between fact and fiction, documentation and imagination. With an anthropological and ethnographic academic background, I aim to create work that not only fosters debate and dialogue around the production of cultural and political knowledge, but actually redefines, recreates, and reinterprets that knowledge as a product of the world within which it exists."

"I don't want to paint rainbows; I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority. "

"Everyone hates the police, because they’re always asking for money, and it seemed like something that should be addressed in art. I wanted to see how easy it was to put yourself in power with a uniform."