She fought her fears and broke free

April 03, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 07:38 am IST - NEW DELHI:

Photographs by Kabul resident Hanifa Alizada are on display at the Niv Art Centre at Neb Sarai.

Photographs by Kabul resident Hanifa Alizada are on display at the Niv Art Centre at Neb Sarai.

“Only when we are no longer afraid, do we begin to live,” said American journalist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson.

Hanifa Alizada from Afghanistan seems to have heeded those very words. Fighting against her conservative relatives and the Taliban, she took recourse to a camera to say what she wouldn’t have been able to had she not been tough and creative.

The 25-year-old is on a short trip to Delhi for a solo show of her photographs on the state of women’s affairs in her country in specific and the South-Asian women in general.

Titled “Before Your Own Eyes”, her collection of black and white photographs is on display at Niv Art Centre at Neb Sarai.

The show, low on glamour and high on content, questions the age-old practice of arranged marriages in Afghanistan, the state of married women and the social hierarchy in her country based on features, complexion, caste, gender and status. Accordingly, she has chosen three series of pictures on the subject.

Series one, comprising four photographs titled “Proposal, Good Protector, Engagement and Zeal”, shows a bearded man proposing to a burqa-clad woman. The next shows the woman saying yes and the man’s joyful response. The third picture sees them enjoying the evening together as a couple, while the fourth, the only colourful picture in the show, looks at the man literally from the woman’s point of view — though the netted opening in the burqa.

Hanifa explains: “Women in Afghanistan always have to go in for arranged marriages. They cannot see or meet the man they are supposed to live with their whole life. They must wear a burqa — hidden from the man. She is not supposed to know him, but love him nonetheless. I am questioning the shackles she is not allowed to break free from. When a woman sees her husband-to-be-through the netted opening in the burqa, that becomes the happiest moment for her. Hence, ‘Zeal’ is the only colourful picture in my whole show.”

Her other work in the series is the tale of a married couple’s relationship. The eight-photograph series shows an educated girl working on her Apple (symbolic of Eve) laptop. In the next several pictures, her husband is shown covering her from head-to-toe with heaps of shawls in colours he likes. By the time we arrive at the last picture, the woman’s laptop has been shut, the power connection (to the world) cut off and she resembles a shape wrapped in a shroud. Meanwhile, the husband sits next to her, posing with his “fully covered” wife.

The artist explains it as the Afghani man’s hypocrisy of “wanting an educated woman as a wife, only to cut her wings by wrapping her the way he wants and finally turning her into a lifeless mould”.

In yet another series titled “Wedding, Real Life and Circumstances”, Hanifa shows three photographs of a girl displaying how her jewellery, during and after the wedding, turns into chains of slavery. As she takes them off, her body is wounded. The wounds are then concealed with bandages.

In the fourth series, men and women are “price-tagged” in a super market according to their gender, features, complexion, nationality, status, etc.

Hanifa, whose family suffered under the conservative Taliban regime in Afghanistan, says her father did not want her to suffer the way he did. So he took her to Iran when she was just two-year-old. She studied there for a few years and went back to Kabul “after the Taliban was relatively reduced to size”. She now teaches photography at Kabul University.

Married to a man of her choice, also a photographer in Kabul, Hanifa has broken the norm in Afghanistan with support of her parents.

A veteran of several shows in Switzerland, the U.K., the U.S., Italy, Pakistan and India, Hanifa says change is slowly visible as most of her students come from conservative families.

“One day, some more from them will break free like me,” she adds smiling.

The show ends on April 14.

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