ART/GralInt-TED Talks-Amn Mojadidi: A sense of humor about Afganistan

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Transcript: (Applause)

So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebelsto the battle for Jalalabadas a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida.

(Laughter)

I traded my Converse black low-topsfor a pair of brown leather sandalsand launched a rocket towards government tanksthat I couldn't even see.And this was my first time in Afghanistan.Long before that I had grown up with the war,but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer gamesand fistfights with racist children of the Confederacyand religio-nationalist demonstrationschanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan,"and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant.

But this is the geography of self.And so I stand here today,Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God,(Laughter)an atheist and a radically politicized artistwho's been living, working and creating in Afghanistanfor the last nine years.Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you couldmake art about in Afghanistan,but personally I don't want to paint rainbows;I want to make art that disturbs identityand challenges authorityand exposes hypocrisyand reinterprets realityand even uses kind of an imaginative ethnographyto try and understand the world that we live in.

I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangsterwho wears his jihad against the communistslike popstar blingand uses armed religious intimidation and political corruptionto make himself rich.

(Laughter)

And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliamentand do a public installation campaignwith the slogan: "Vote for me! I've done jihad, and I'm rich."

(Laughter)

And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiososwho are masquerading as national heroes.

I want to look into corruption in Afghanistanthrough a work called "Payback"and impersonate a police officer,set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars,but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them moneyand apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department --(Applause)and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf.

I want to look at how, in my opinion,the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic.The war and the expatriate life that comes with ithave created this environment of style and fashionthat can only be describedthrough creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bomberswhere I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacketor make multiple interior pocketson fashionable neo-traditional vests.

And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrowand putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiativesbeing rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoricabout a "white man's burden"to save the brown man from himselfand maybe even civilize him a bit.

But doing these things, they can get you in jail,they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted.But I do them because I have to,because the geography of self mandates it.That is my burden. What's yours?

Thank you.

(Applause)