In Asadollah Baran Boroumand’s installation, one can find, apart from the image of women deteriorating in Afghanistan, a bitter truth underneath: The feminine body has transmuted and degraded into the form of a fully covering hijab, a form tailored to the curvatures of the female body, at times recalling the sad posture she is seated in. This bitter truth is rooted in the way the artist sees the female body: he crosses out in the figure the flesh or any feature that makes a body apart from the hijab. The body has been emptied from within, and the void itself expresses the absence of the female body. Boroumand’s portrayal is not only a depiction of Afghan woman in the rubbles of wars, but the practice of crossing out female body such that nothing is left but a reductionist veil, a silhouette. In the moment of representing the female body, Boroumand’s critical approach concurs with the sexism dominant in his society. How does he see a woman? A blue piece of cloth dancing in the coquetry of wind or mute sirens lamenting over their bodies in a debris of a crumbling ruin?
