Against her family’s wishes, Kubra Khademi went to study at the Fine Arts Faculty at Kabul University and then at Beaconhouse National University School of Visual Arts and Design in Lahore, Pakistan. After receiving death threats following a performance in 2015 in which she wandered the streets of Kabul dressed in a suit of armour that emphasised her breasts and buttocks, Kubra Khademi moved to France. She continues in her work to denounce an oppressive, patriarchal society in which women are persecuted on a daily basis.

In parallel to the performances that she is invited to present in many countries, she continues to draw almost every day as she has done since childhood. In her immediately recognizable, pure and clean style, she portrays naked female figures (often her or her mother’s body) in symbolic compositions that recount the complexity of a world where a woman’s body must submit so as not to challenge the rules of conservative society. Just like in her performances, but here with immediate pictural poetry, Khademi confronts the atrocities she has known in the past and which comprise the present for many women. These bodies are defined and somehow protected by the innocence of the areas of flat colour, the fragile protection afforded by the rings traced under the eyes in gouache and the economy of detail. Her delicate, free, insolent figures of outstanding formal beauty occupy the paper and become part of our conscience like an act of resistance.

Images: Portrait of Kubra Khademi, © Basel Tawil
Kubra Khademi, The Birth Giving, 2019