'Their soul listens': A Sociology from Art Praxis in Kabul
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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Working through the legacy of war and the daily potential for violence, young šš¢š£š¶ššŖ artists carve out moments of peace in Kabulās streets and galleries. This thesis is a qualitative study of how young artists in Kabul are using their art practice to navigate and negotiate their sociocultural contexts and leverage the creative process to impact change. In doing so, they make change possible by suturing ruptures caused by conflict and actively responding to local challenges. The empirical data consists of in-depth semi-structured interviews with sixteen artists based in Kabul, male and female, in late 2017 and early 2018. The thesis presents themes from the empirical work in three parts, each consisting of two chapters.
The analysis combines a sociology from art praxis with a Southern theory approach in which artists construct and explore new ways of being through a dynamic creative process. Artists offer complexity and nuance about their contexts by envisioning ways of being that are specific to their locale, and which exist outside reifications such as modern and traditional, rational and emotional. The research approaches the artistsā art praxis as forms of knowledge, and employs Southern theory as an approach to theorise the necessity of art.
The thesis first explores the affective impact of art as a common human attribute and its linkage to social change and social cohesion. Given that artistsā use of social media formed a key avenue for distribution of their works, the thesis also explores how social media presence can act as a form of alternative media in the contemporary context. By leveraging the online space, artists are able to bridge difference across time and distance, as well as create opportunities to self-narrate.
The thesis then focuses on gender as a key construct of identity. The analysis argues for a feminism which raises feminist praxis over the label of feminist, a position which is responsive to a context in which āfeminismā is associated with Western incursions on society and culture. The chapter raises the question of liberal feminist teachingsā applicability in a context like Kabul. Challenging reified tropes of masculinity, the analysis also complicates conceptualisations of Afghan men as warlord or warrior and argues that men in Afghanistan navigate difficult and rigid cultural expectations. A code of honour limits both menās and womenās movement.
Finally, the thesis seeks to humanise and demystify the artists discussed in the thesis. The thesis makes a case against reductive orientalising caricatures of Afghan men, women, and culture by presenting their subjectivities. As artists practicing in volatile environments, they have in-depth and nuanced understandings of their situations which they navigate. Kabul, the city in which they practice their art and from which they distribute their work, becomes the protagonist of the final chapter. By practicing art in public spaces in Kabul, a form of public pedagogy creates a public termed the incidental-ephemeral public with whom the affective residue of the art and the art scene travels.
In keeping to the hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, weaved through the thesis is the authorās own position as a former refugee and Afghan living in diaspora.
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