Shamsia Hassani gives women a commanding presence in images where architecture, color and silence carry much of the story. Her figures can appear larger than the spaces around them, turning a wall or a painted cityscape into a place where an Afghan woman cannot simply be overlooked.
Who is Shamsia Hassani?
The Hammer Museum’s profile of Hassani records her birth in Tehran in 1988 and her art degrees from Kabul University. The museum’s 2016 biography also identifies her as a fine-arts lecturer at Kabul University. Her practice includes graffiti and painting, and her earlier work brought contemporary art into public spaces in Afghanistan.
In a first-person interview about her work, Hassani explains her interest in showing women with strength and energy. That intention helps move the conversation beyond a simple description of her pictures as sad: presence, possibility and self-expression matter alongside the difficult conditions to which some works respond.
In the 2013 interview quoted by the 2021 article, Hassani explained why her painted women take up so much space:
"In the past, women were removed from society and they wanted women to stay only at home and wanted to forget about women. Now, I want to use my paintings to remind people about women. I have changed my images to show the strength of women, the joy of women. In my artwork, there is lots of movement. I want to show that women have returned to Afghan society with a new, stronger shape. It's not the woman who stays at home. It's a new woman. A woman who is full of energy, who wants to start again. You can see that in my artwork, I want to change the shape of women. I am painting them larger than life. I want to say that people look at them differently now."
The words belong to that earlier interview, before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. The later images were introduced amid fears about the future of women’s public lives and artistic expression. Keeping the two moments separate preserves both her earlier ambition and the later work’s setting. Her upbringing in Iran and studies in Kabul form part of that history; the Hammer Museum records her birth in 1988, correcting the 2021 article’s 1998 date.
Reading the figures and their surroundings
Notice how a woman’s outline stands apart from the architecture behind her. A limited group of colors can make the figure immediately recognizable, while a larger wall gives that presence a scale unavailable on a small sheet of paper. The relationship between figure and setting is part of the message.
Images published around the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 belong to that historical moment. They should not be accompanied by an unverified claim about where Hassani is living or working today. The artwork and its documented context provide enough to engage with without that speculation.
For another response to a particular public crisis, see Hayat Nazer’s Beirut memorial sculpture. And A Space of Their Own offers a broader resource for discovering women whose artistic careers deserve more sustained attention.
Credits and further reading: Shamsia Hassani · said.
COMMENTS