“I don't like to paint nature, I don't like to paint flowers,” says Afghani artist Khaled Fazl. You can see flowers in nature, but you can't see human struggle.”
In Fazl's oil paintings, human struggle is everywhere. An emaciated child stands next to a barbed wire fence. Another, shrouded in a sleeping bag, sits behind a begging bowl. A pair of small hands clutch at a wire cage. But instead of defeat and death, there is a tension between oppressive conditions and the people who live in them. In Struggle, a nude crouching man strains against the coils of a serpent, a symbol of evil in both Judeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. This is a view of the world the artist developed in a country where life goes on despite war, repression and poverty, but one that has been universalized to apply to all humankind.
Growing up in Kabul, Fazl acquired a humanistic outlook on life. His father was a high-ranking army officer who retired during the Communist era, while his mother was a school principal. Fazl started painting at the end of elementary school, improvising his first paintbrushes from shaving brushes, pieces of wooden coat hangers and metal bullet casings, ubiquitous after years of civil war.
He is mainly self-taught as a painter. His aunt in Istanbul sent him oil paints; he didn't know how to use them properly, or how to make a canvas. A family friend taught him watercolours technique.
Painting was difficult to pursue in Afghanistan. Fazl's generation has seen a series of authoritarian governments and almost constant warfare. “You can't see any buildings [in Kabul] without any damage,” Fazl notes. Rockets hit his family home twice. He lost his left eye in another bombardment, and once he was held prisoner for two weeks by Communist forces. These experiences convinced him of the need for artists to tell of the costs of war in their work.
The situation became so dire that Fazl left Afghanistan for Canada in 1992, part of the diaspora of the country's middle class. His family is now scattered around the world, from Canada to Germany to Australia. Fazl had to leave his early paintings behind, and only recently has he recovered them.
Although it was after his departure that the Taliban took power in Af, Fazl feels their impact keenly. “[T]hey completely abandoned art or anything that involved the human figure, because those fundamentalists say that if you create a human figure in your art or sculpture, you're just playing God. … Also, they abandoned all photography and movies.”
The arts and humanities had already been suffering in Afghanistan. The Kabul Museum was bombed in 1993, and its collection of European and Asian artifacts were being lost to war damage and looting. Under the Taliban's 2001 edict, many artistic and religious works were deliberately destroyed, including ancient Buddhist temples and statues.
Even since the fall of the Taliban, contemporary art in Afghanistan has been having trouble making a comeback. Fazl states that this is due to beliefs, personal poverty and a broken economy.
Today, Fazl lives in Vancouver with his wife and two-year-old son. He is completing his industrial design studies at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, while he continues painting. He paints for his family, for exhibitions and for buyers — when he knows they are committed to taking care of his work.
Fazl says that people in Western countries have a narrow view of Afghanistan and its people, based on only a few stereotypical images from magazines and television: mujahedeen wielding AK-47 rifles, or women rendered anonymous and mute beneath burqas. He hopes to counteract that preconception, expanding his subject matter to include more peaceful portrayals of everyday life in his homeland, such as people at marketplaces or men playing buzkashi, a traditional sport. These are aspects of Afghani life that people have struggled to keep alive, despite generations of war and repression.
Fazl's other passion is industrial design. He is particularly drawn to designs based on the organic form movement that followed World War II, such as the work of Alvar Aalto, who was inspired by landscape in his domestic design work.
Despite his personal history and the grim subject matter of some of his paintings, Fazl has strong humanist beliefs, influenced by Sartre. “My idea is, respect human life, human society, and do … something so that, after you are gone, your name still remains.”
Peter Tupper Freelance journalist Vancouver, BC
Figure. Khaled Fazl, 1996. Miniature. Photo by: Khaled Fazl
Figure. Khaled Fazl, 1996. Struggle. Photo by: Khaled Fazl