
Kabir Mokamel, with Omaid Sharifi, the Founder of Art Lords, will start a working group for Afghan Artists on 9th of August 2024 in the frame of the Kite-Runner activities.
Emerging and experienced artists are welcomed to develop and work out a project. Selected works will be part of an Art Event in November in Istanbul.
Please apply when you are interested to: info@diyalog.der.eu
ArtLords, is a grassroots movement that aims to create a visual dialogue, promote tolerance and hold officials to account through public art murals throughout Afghanistan.
“It started in 2014 as a result of being sick of the sight of blast walls throughout the city,” co-founder, Omaid Sharifi, told us in 2022 during the Art-Event of the Goethe-Institut in Exile Afghanistan in Berlin. “I always thought of Kabul as a beautiful city, but these blast walls block roads and views – it is suffocating. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
Together with Co-founder Kabir Mokamel and a group of others, they secured permission from the government to begin painting the gray concrete structures with striking images, in an attempt to make them disappear while also delivering important political messages to spur social change.
Kabir Mokamel: “ArtLords – the name deliberately chosen as a positive spin on the well-known terms “warlords” and “drug lords” – now has a team of more than 50 to 100 people who have painted about 2,000 murals across 22 of the country’s 34 provinces.”
This work was published on Instagram on 4th of July 2024 with the comment:
#Happy4thofJuly – you can do better, America!