No End in Sight: Growing up in War-Torn Afghanistan

No End in Sight, a solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Aziz Hazara, was held at the Hessel Museum, New York in 2020. The title is an evocation of the fatigue of a generation that grew up in a war-torn Afghanistan (that Hazara as well as the curator, Muheb Esmat belong to). The timeline of the exhibition spans a continuous series of wars that began with the Saur Revolution of 1978, led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan against then president Mohammad Daoud Khan. This was followed by a Soviet invasion, the Soviet-Afghan war, a civil war, the Taliban regime and finally the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States of America and its allies in 2001.

The significance of sight operates on two levels within Hazara’s work. The work begins by looking at the concealed ways in which terror is inflicted upon the Afghan population, such as constant surveillance. The artist goes on to use these very technologies of vision—night vision equipment and surveillance blimps—within the works themselves to reverse the operation of seeing. As Esmat writes in his introductory note, “The works presented in the exhibition make visible the complex operations deployed as a part of the conflict, which simultaneously make use of the technologies of vision but also stay hidden from our sight.”  

There were three works included in this exhibition. “Camouflage” (2016) is a set of images revolving around night-raids—another frequent occurrence during the war—taken through night-vision goggles, giving them a greenish-hue, heightening the feeling of dystopia while looking at the landscape of Kabul. "Kite Balloon” (2018) consists of digital photographs that capture the city of Kabul from a distance. The intent behind these images is to be able to capture the all-seeing blimp—with its surveillance cameras—as it floats over the city. Finally, “Dialectics” (2016) is a video piece that analyses the visual archives produced by war. It merges found footage from various official archives and television broadcasts with material collected by soldiers. Hazara sutures these together along with footage shot he shot using a night-vision camera that he found in a second-hand market in Kabul.

An investigation of power and political structures, the exhibition was itself a powerful statement by both artist and curator. Locating this discourse within a museum in an American institution (the Hessel Museum is a part of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York), they brought not just their personal memories of war and growing up with it, but also the collective memory of a people and a nation.

To read more about this exhibition, please click here.

All works by Aziz Hazara. Images courtesy of the artist and the curator.