Wanting to return to his family home, and to engage with a new generation of young Afghans, Ali moved back to Bamiyan in 2006 to conduct drawing workshops with local children. "I found their drawings were full of weapons and massacre scenes," he describes. Hand grenades, guns, missiles, and helicopters rendered in a childish hand populated these nightmare dreamscapes. Ali took these drawings to Japan, where, as part of an artist’s residency, he asked Japanese children to draw over and alongside the Afghan children’s imagery with symbols and images from their own environment. Ali later completed the works, which became the "Absent Kitchen" series, with his own embellishments, drawing out the macabre contrasts between Hello Kitty and Kalashnikovs, or the juxtaposition of Star Wars characters with lightsabers next to tanks and fighter jets. (The series’s title was derived from a drawing by a Japanese child, who, in empathy with homeless Afghan children, drew his own home without a kitchen.)

These strange contrasts have a powerful resonance for Ali, who, both peronally and artistically, is caught between conflicting traditions and cultures. He moves between the conservative society of Quetta to the buzzing modern metropolis of Karachi — or Fukoyama. By studying miniature painting, he rediscovered a connection with his Persian heritage, which has also given him a new understanding of his own time. Ali’s paintings reflect this complex interweaving, using symbols, myths, and allusion to reveal contradictory but coexisting layers of history, culture, and experience. Myth is grounded in history, and vice versa; Ali uses this symbiosis to show his own world turned upside down.

Khadim Ali’s work will be shown in the group exhibition "East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan" at the Venice Biennale, June 7-Nov. 22.

"Gilded Demons" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.