Gilded Demons

Courtesy the artist

Khadim Ali in his studio, Fort Norborja, Kabul, 2009

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Khadim Ali remembers a period a few years ago when he frequently heard young Taliban in the streets of Quetta, Pakistan, shouting: "We are the new Rustam! We are the Rustam of Islam!" Rustam is the hero of the 10th-century Persian epic poem the Shanamah, or Book of Kings. The Illiad of the Farsi-speaking world, the poem relates the trials and epic battles of successive Persian kings. Rustam is like the Achilles of the Shanamah, a mighty warrior who upholds virtue and honor through glorious deeds. For Ali, to hear the Taliban co-opt the name of this Persian hero for their own brutal purposes was anathema. Even worse, in 2006, Ali met a young boy in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, called Rustam, and asked him the origin of his name. Alarmingly, the boy had not heard of the Persian hero and only connected his name to the Taliban cause.

Ali’s ongoing "Rustam" series of miniature paintings, which he started in 2007, explores and updates the epic and its now appropriated hero. In one painting, a standing demon with a sagging belly is silhouetted with rich gold and embossed with repetitive patterns of Persian letters. He holds out a dandelion, delicately traced with a feathery brush, to two facing figures of similar stature, with horned heads and hanging folds of flesh. At once familiar and otherworldly, these menacing figures physically resemble the traditional demons of the Shanamah, like the deo-e-safid (white demon) and deo-e-siyah (black demon), but they have been adapted to evoke Taliban fighters through their long beards and Pashtun features. Ali is all too aware of the shifting meanings of heroism in his region; the Taliban were themselves once the freedom-fighting mujahideen, heroes of the war against the Soviet invasion.

In 2003 Ali graduated from the National College of Arts in Lahore, the only college in the world that offers a bachelor’s degree in the techniques and history of miniature painting (and the alma mater of such artists as Shazia Sikander and Imran Qureshi). As part of his training, Ali learned to make brushes from kitten hair and pigeon feathers, and to boil flour into a sticky paste used to glue sheets of paper into wasli, the material used by miniatures painters for centuries. Despite the emphasis on mastering traditional techniques, the school encourages experimentation in more contemporary media, like large-scale installations, digital animation, or video.

Ali, however, admits that he has an almost fetishistic attachment to traditional miniature-painting practices: "My involvement with materials really matters. My work becomes something that truly extends from a part of myself. This process is an extension of myself, my own thinking, my happiness and my catharsis." Catharsis resonates especially powerfully in the context of Ali’s history — a subject never far from his work.

In 1978 Ali was born in Quetta, northwest Pakistan, to a family of Hazara refugees from central Afghanistan. For many centuries the minority Hazara people, who practice Shia Islam rather than the locally dominant Sunni Islam, have been subject to pogroms and persecution across Afghanistan, which intensified during the Soviet occupation, and then again under the Taliban. Ali’s family fled in the early 1970s to settle in Quetta, but this border town became another stronghold for the Taliban movement as the US-led intervention pushed it out of Afghanistan in 2001. The streets filled with trigger-happy new recruits, and Quetta was no longer a safe haven for the Hazara people. As the violence increased, Ali divided his time tending to his family in Quetta and his studio in Karachi. Ali’s obsessive return to the subject of Rustam is a rumination on the loss of his cultural bearings as both a refugee and as an outsider within his own country, as well as on the appropriation of his cultural heritage. His series explores the meanings of different symbols, and exploits the friction caused by subtle combinations, such as the demon holding out a dandelion, a symbol of better things to come. But with deliberate irony he increasingly covers meaningless letters with gold leaf, commenting on how gilded words with perverted meanings have seduced more and more people in his region toward religious fundamentalism. "The true value of words and ideas," Ali says, "is lost to the demons."

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.