After a life of hardship, Afghan artist paints his hope for his homeland
dscape in pink. A small town with clay houses and minarets blends harmoniously into the background. Children play on dusty, narrow streets. Men clad in turbans and kaftans squat around gray-bearded elders.
Artist Akhbar Khurasany has been away from his native Afghanistan for 18 years, a refugee who fled from a land plagued by conflict. But every night Khurasany’s homeland comes to him in a dream. And by day, he paints it.
“I miss my home. It’s a very beautiful land,” says Khurasany.
For the last twenty years, the word “Afghanistan” has been associated with war, religious fanaticism and terrorism. But in Khurasany’s paintings, one sees a completely different picture: A dervish – a traveling wizard – playing a horn for a village crowd; a young couple in traditional Afghani dress walking in the early morning light; a Buddhist monastery in the northwestern city of Bamian, home to the ancient Kushan Dynasty; and a gaping, man-made hole in a storied rock, the former site of a 57-meter statue of Buddha dynamited by the Taliban.
Khurasany’s upcoming exhibit at the British Council is called “War and Peace in Afghanistan” and will feature almost two dozen paintings. There isn’t a single hint of disaster or grief among them.
“If I were painting blood and violence, I would only increase the amount of evil in the world,” Khurasany said. The war has meddled irreconcilably in Khurasany’s life. “As long as I remember myself, I have heard about war,” he said.
Khurasany, 42, comes from the small village of Santakht, high in Afghanistan’s mountain territory. To get there from Kabul requires two days by car and then two days riding a donkey through rocky canyons and alpine passes.
Since the time of Alexander the Great, little has changed there. People keep cattle and grow wheat and corn on steep hillsides. During the cold, snowy winters, large families huddle together under one big blanket telling fairy tales and singing songs before bedtime. It is a place of deep-rooted culture and family ties.
Khurasany is the first-born of six children. When he turned 15, his father took him to Kabul to study (it took them a fortnight to walk there). On their way, they spent a night at an inn. There Khurasany first saw a piece of artwork. It was a portrait of the innkeeper drawn by a passing schoolteacher. The young and impressionable Khurasany was very surprised.
“I never thought a person could do anything like this by hand,” Khurasany recalls.
By day he studied to be an auto-mechanic, but by night he attended art courses. Khurasany earned excellent grades for his paintings and won three national competitions in calligraphy.
When Khurasany was in the 10th grade, war broke out and the young artist was conscripted to fight, eventually serving for five years. By then, all but one of the soldiers from his military unit had perished.
Fortunately for Khurasany, he never saw action on the front lines: his job was writing slogans and drawing posters for the army. When Defense Ministry officials saw his work, they were very pleased, and they eventually sent him to the Soviet Union to study.
In 1986, Khurasany arrived in Kyiv. He hoped that the war would be over before he graduated in 1994. Instead, the situation worsened; the Taliban had come to power.
“I lost all hope,” Khurasany said. He asked for political asylum in Ukraine and sometimes remained in his tiny dormitory room for weeks at a time, busying himself with painting.
“I was daydreaming that I continued looking for my home, but couldn’t find it,” he recalls. “But then the sun rose. Its light shone through the ruins, and I realized that good times were still to come.”
Khurasany thus committed to canvas “The Window of Hope.” He says that it helped him to survive through his darkest years.
Today Khurasany is much more active. Since his graduation, he has had 10 personal exhibitions and participated in dozens of other joint shows.
“Akhbar Khurasany is quite a well-known artist in Kyiv,” said Public Information Assistant Natalia Prokopchuk of the UN High Commission for Refugees. “He is one of the refugees who has reached some status in Ukraine and become noticeable.”
Despite all his success, Khurasany continues to wait for his Ukrainian citizenship rather than return to war-ravaged Afghanistan. It has now been two years since he completed the citizenship application process, and by all rules, he should have it. He is desperate to visit his family and without Ukrainian citizenship, he cannot go. In Afghanistan he will be immediately re-conscripted into the country’s fledgling army.
Still, Khurasany believes that peace is finally coming to his native Afghanistan.
“I see how my vision of hope is becoming a reality – the sun rising again over the chaos and ruin.”
