Pablo Picasso Keith Tyson Christo Jackson Pollock Joseph Beuys Raymond Pettibon Marcel Duchamp Deitch Defends Dakis Joannou Show at the New Museum

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A few months ago, as a huge sun slipped behind the mountains that encircle the city of Kabul, I stood in the courtyard of a beautiful brick caravansary building and watched a young woman being awarded the first ever Afghan Contemporary Art Prize. It was a historic moment in so many ways—that a young woman should win a major new prize, earning the comparatively huge sum of $2,000; that she should win with an artwork that might best be described, in Western contemporary art terms, as Raymond Pettibon meets Keith Tyson; and that there should be any such thing as a contemporary art prize in the medieval society that modern-day Afghanistan still is.

The winner, Sahba Shams, studies law at Qateb University, and attends one of the city’s few, small private art schools, Bahram Art Centre. Her works are collections of drawings, cartoons, collages, writings, and scientific equations; together, they build a complex picture of the impossible puzzle of present-day life and politics in Afghanistan, a nominally independent state still caught in the crossfire of conflicting foreign interests.

For obvious reasons—30 years of war and a continuing battle against violent government opposition across the country—contemporary art barely exists in Afghanistan. There is a National Gallery of Art in Kabul that contains kitsch copies of 19th-century genre painting, and two official, but dilapidated, art schools—the Faculties of Fine Arts at Kabul and Herat Universities—which both promote a pastiche, realist style left over from the Soviet era. A more optimistic place is the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan, where women are able to study for free every afternoon, and which encourages experimentation in unfamiliar forms such as installation art and filmmaking.

I moved to Afghanistan 18 months ago to work for a cultural heritage organization called Turquoise Mountain. Although most of our work focuses on reviving historic arts, crafts, and architecture, I was also determined to do something to support contemporary art. I wanted to know if there were talented artists persisting secretly with their work, and how art emerges in a country with little art education and very limited exposure to artistic developments in the outside world. An Afghan friend, Tamim Samee, suggested an art prize. This seemed a good way to attract attention and participants, bring together a cross-section of art produced across the country and, with any luck, find some new talent. I had in mind the model of the Turner Prize, which I had helped curate in 2000 while working at the Tate in London. The Turner Prize was originally set up for similar reasons—to stimulate the visual-arts scene and encourage national interest in, and debate about, contemporary art. Why couldn’t this also happen in Afghanistan?

After advertising the prize on national radio, television, and on posters printed in the Dari and Pashto languages, we received more than 75 entries from all over the country—including badlands such as Khost in the southeast, once central command for Al Qaeda; from Kandahar, currently still a Taliban-dominated city; Badakshan in the remote, mountainous north, and the big cities Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kabul. Many of the entries were the expected painted cameos of street life. But there were also some surprises. We received a number of photography, film, and video entries, including a Sufi horror film.

After a full day of debate, we narrowed the entries down to 10 finalists. Their participation in two weeks of art workshops was eye-opening for all of us. They saw, many for the first time, images by great modern Western masters such as Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock, Beuys, as well as work closer to home by established Indian and Iranian artists. The workshops brought to light many of the key issues and challenges that surround the introduction of Western contemporary art to a place like Afghanistan. How important is it to introduce these artists to the canonic images of Western art? Many images or ideas that I had taken for granted as universal—for example, the expressions of pain and suffering in the faces of the figures and animals in Picasso’s Guernica— turned out to be culturally specific and were not recognizable to these young Afghans. When we discussed ideas of beauty, I was reminded again of how relative such values can be. The symbols of beauty Afghani artists brought forward included a banknote, a cut-glass sugar bowl, and a pumped-up bodybuilder—images that surely relate to Afghanistan’s devastated history and current poverty.