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Arts | New Jersey

Despite Conflict and Repression, Creativity

An Afghan “war rug” at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery.Credit...Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

In assembling “Art Amongst War: Visual Culture in Afghanistan, 1979-2014,” the current exhibition at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery, Deborah Hutton discovered works that evoked feelings ranging from dismay to guarded hope.

But Dr. Hutton, the curator of the show and an associate professor of art history at the college, also expects visitors to react with surprise. Not just at what is portrayed in the pieces, but that the art, which will be on display through April 17, even exists.

“Most of the images we see of Afghanistan are the ones that are in the news, of the Taliban or of women in burqas. There’s this idea that there’s no culture left at all, which isn’t true,” said Dr. Hutton, 43, of Trenton.

Dr. Hutton specializes in Islamic art, including the art of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, having done most of her research in India. She has not been to Afghanistan, which “has not been a great place to travel” since she began her career in the late 1990s, she said. 

“It’s been 35 years since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the country has been at war or occupied since then,” Dr. Hutton said. That may have curtailed artistic expression in a culture once vivid with art, she said. But the drive to create meaning amid chaos has never been fully quashed, and in recent years, she said, the Afghan art scene has re-emerged.

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Scarves embroidered by women who are part of Kandahar Treasure, a nonprofit organization for female artisans.Credit...Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

For example, the six photographers in the exhibition, which encompasses 51 works by 17 artists in a spectrum of disciplines, are members of the Afghan Photography Network, founded in 2013. (The college printed the photographs using digital files sent by the photographers.) Rahraw Omarzad, who contributed a video to the show that considers the repression and resilience of Afghan women during the Taliban regime, is the director of the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan in Kabul, established in 2004.

The anonymous weavers of six 1980s and 1990s-era “war rugs” — carpets whose motifs include land mines, guns and soldiers — may have had no formal training, learning from their relatives, but they have incorporated the grim realities of life in a war zone into their traditional craft.

And still other artists represented in the show, which Dr. Hutton began assembling with Emily Croll, director of the gallery, in January 2013, arrived at their perspectives from outside the country. Five artists, including Moshtari Hilal, a 21-year-old with four trauma-themed ink-on-paper works in the exhibition, are émigrés or children of émigrés; Ms. Hilal — one of the many artists whose works had never before been displayed in the United States, according to Ms. Croll — lives in Hamburg, Germany.

“It’s a very diverse group of material, and a very diverse group of artists with very different experiences. But I feel that, however it comes together, it’s giving a little window into a country that’s far away, that most Americans know very little about,” Dr. Hutton said.

Images like Roqia Alavi’s vividly colored “Tent Settlement in Kabul,” a 2012 digital photograph of a girl squatting to wash clothes at a makeshift wash basin, align with preconceived ideas about the ravaged villages and hardships of current life in the country’s biggest city. A nearby text panel notes that for the past 32 years, Afghans have made up the largest refugee population in the world. Many of those refugees have returned to Kabul, among the safest places to live in Afghanistan because so much of the countryside is still littered with land mines, Dr. Hutton said.

Not every piece engages viewers with the effects of grief and loss so directly. Mohsin Wahidi’s “Untitled Miniature, Kala Minar Series,” a mixed-media piece from 2010, is more about recalling Afghanistan’s artistic legacy: It borrows the traditional Persian miniature technique to hint at a desire for the reclamation of a forgotten past, according to Dr. Hutton, even as the center of the scarlet-hued canvas depicts a modern-seeming line of mysterious shrouded figures.

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A 2009 silk-screen calligraphy piece by Zolaykha Sherzad related to the burqa.Credit...Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

Hope is evident in a 2008 video installment, “In Transit,” by Lida Abdul. The film, which runs nearly five minutes, portrays 70 schoolchildren playing on and around the hull of an abandoned Soviet plane; in their imaginings, they fly it as if it were a kite. Ms. Abdul, of Los Angeles, is among the best-known artists in the show, Dr. Hutton said. That may be at least partly because she was born in 1973 and has been exhibiting her work since the 1990s, while many of the artists represented are younger, in their 20s and 30s.

The exhibition has a nearly equal number of male and female artists. “That came about accidentally,” said Dr. Hutton, who explained that “women are embracing an increase in opportunities” since the United States overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

One of the artists, Zolaykha Sherzad, traveled to the college from her home in Manhattan to install her two works. The more prominently displayed work, a 2009 silk-screen calligraphy piece hung from the ceiling near the gallery’s entrance, is captured on a bold, swooping swirl of red silk that calls to mind a whirling dervish or a cocoon unspooling. The title, “Hawa-e-Azad,” loosely translates as “free space,” Ms. Sherzad said in a phone interview.

“For me, this is a way to express the freedom of a woman,” she said. “It’s very much related to the burqa.”

Ms. Sherzad, 46, wandered through “Art Against War” just before it was fully installed.

“What I saw was a group of artists who have different means of addressing modern Afghanistan,” she said. “Devastation is very much present, but it’s a rich environment. Each work has a very specific, unique message.

“I saw a lot of beauty.”

“Art Amongst War: Visual Culture in Afghanistan, 1979-2014,” is at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, through April 17. Open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 7 p.m., Sunday, 1 to 3 p.m., and by appointment; free admission. For information: (609) 771-2633 or tcnj.edu.

“Art Amongst War: Visual Culture in Afghanistan, 1979-2014,” is at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, through April 17. Open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 7 p.m., Sunday, 1 to 3 p.m., and by appointment; free admission. For information: (609) 771-2633 or tcnj.edu/artgallery.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section NJ, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Conflict and Repression, Creativity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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