Kubra

 Kubra Khademi - New Work for Women and Children First!

The renowned and celebrated artist Kubra Khademi has risked her life in defiance of the treatment of women within structures of patriarchal oppression in her native Afghanistan and elsewhere. Using performance and visual works, she uses simple techniques to make the invisible power structures, or unspoken truths, visible. This is what motivated the artistic team of Vooruit to invite her to create a work for Women and Children First, a focus programme that explores feminism through intersectionality. Rather than continuing to foster the feminism of the previous generation that prioritised the experience of well-educated white women, intersectionality, and our approach to making a focus programme about power, privilege and feminism, was to work collaboratively, share power, and seek not only to include but to platform the voices and experiences of not just women, but women of colour, women of a wider range of abilities, women of different social classes, trans and non-binary people and (even!) men.

The drawing of Kubra Khademi highlights power of women in the life cycles of birth and nurture, with the central image of a woman being both held/pulled by her hair by four other women. Her work asks us to look at the female body in relationship to other female bodies, as life giving, inter-connected, dependant on and giving of nurture. It’s in your face, very simple, complex, and funny.

Kubra Khademi is an Afghan artist who was born 1989. She is a performance artist and a feminist based in Paris. Through her practice, Khademi explores her life as a refugee and a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University, before attending Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore she began to create public performance, a practice she continued upon her return to Kabul, where her work actively responded to a male dominated society by extreme patriarchal politics. After performing her piece known as Armor in 2015, Khademi was forced to flee her home country. She currently lives and works in Paris, France. More on http://kubrakhademi.org/