Originally published 2021-09-14.
Within weeks of entering Kabul on 15 August 2021, the Taliban began covering the city's famous murals with paint. Colourful images of peace, women's rights, health campaigns and anti-corruption messages, most of them created by the Afghan art collective ArtLords, disappeared under coats of white and grey. In their place came the Taliban's white flag and slogans celebrating their victory.
For many residents and for the artists themselves, the loss was about more than paint. Those murals had been one of the most visible signs of the open, argumentative public life that Kabul had built over twenty years.
Who ArtLords are
ArtLords was founded in 2014 by Omaid Sharifi and Kabir Mokamel. The name is a deliberate jab at the "warlords" and "drug lords" who had shaped so much of Afghanistan's recent history; the founders wanted artists, not gunmen, to stake a claim on public space.
Their canvas was the city's concrete blast walls. After decades of war, Kabul was lined with tall barriers built to absorb car bombs, grim grey slabs that hemmed in streets, ministries and embassies. ArtLords turned them into murals. Between 2014 and 2022 the collective completed around 2,200 murals across several provinces, according to its Wikipedia entry.
The group's first well-known project, "I See You", painted large watchful eyes on walls near government buildings, a reminder to officials that citizens were watching for corruption. That series won an international anti-corruption award in 2016.
What the murals showed
The subjects ranged widely. Murals promoted polio vaccination, honoured workers and health staff, called for women's education and political participation, and warned against corruption. Some looked beyond Afghanistan: one Kabul mural depicted George Floyd, the Black American man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
Another much-loved mural honoured Dr Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese physician who spent decades in Afghanistan. Starting with medical clinics, he shifted to irrigation after concluding that clean water and working farms would save more lives than medicine alone. His canals helped turn desert near Jalalabad into farmland that supports hundreds of thousands of people. Gunmen killed him in Jalalabad in December 2019, along with five Afghans travelling with him. His Kabul mural was among those erased in 2021.
Many murals were painted with the public. Sharifi has said the collective invited dozens, sometimes hundreds, of residents to help paint each one, so the walls carried community messages rather than only the artists' ideas.
What the Taliban painted instead
From late August and into September 2021, residents and journalists photographed Taliban-aligned painters covering murals across Kabul. Some walls were simply whitewashed. Others received Islamic Emirate flags and slogans congratulating Afghans on the victory or warning them against foreign influence.
For residents, the change was immediate and visible. Streets that had carried bright messages about voting, vaccination and girls going to school turned blank or uniform almost overnight, and many people shared before-and-after photos online as a way of recording what was lost.
Not every erased mural was painted over by the Taliban. Some artists and building owners covered or destroyed their own work, hoping to protect themselves or the people shown in it from reprisals. That detail matters: in the first weeks after the takeover, fear spread faster than formal orders.
Speaking to The Guardian, Sharifi described what the murals meant to him: "Some of these murals were the soul of Kabul."
Why murals matter to whoever rules a city
Public walls are a kind of announcement board for power. Whoever controls what appears on them tells passers-by what is normal, who is in charge and which ideas are welcome. That is why new governments, from revolutionary France to post-Soviet Eastern Europe, so often start by changing statues, street names and murals.
For the Taliban, replacing images of unveiled women, foreign figures and civic campaigns with flags and religious-political slogans served two purposes. It erased the visual record of the Republic era, and it signalled that the space for public argument was closing. During its first period in power, from 1996 to 2001, the movement had banned most music, television and depictions of people, and in 2001 it destroyed the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan.
In 2021 Taliban spokesmen promised a more moderate government. Their treatment of public art was one early test of that promise, and it suggested that cultural freedoms would be among the first things to go. Later restrictions on girls' secondary schooling, women's work and public life confirmed those fears for many observers.
Threats before the takeover
ArtLords did not work freely even under the previous government. Its members received threats from extremists for years, and at least one of its murals, a portrait of the murdered activist Hamida Barmaki, was removed by a militant group in 2018. The collective was reportedly still painting a mural in Kabul on the day Taliban fighters entered the city.
Where the artists are now
After the fall of Kabul, several ArtLords artists tried to leave Afghanistan. The organisation has since opened offices in Virginia and in Istanbul. Sharifi received a fellowship through Harvard's Scholars at Risk programme, and five of the collective's artists were resettled in Vermont, where they have recreated temporary versions of some of their Kabul murals.
Their work has also inspired artists elsewhere. Exhibitions and online archives have displayed photographs of the Kabul walls, and the collective has continued to paint murals on themes such as education for Afghan girls, keeping those causes visible to audiences abroad while artists inside the country face strict limits on what they can show.
The originals are gone, but thousands of photographs survive, taken by residents, journalists and the artists themselves. They remain a record of what Kabul's walls once said, and of the many people who held the brushes.
Sources: Wikipedia: ArtLords; Wikipedia: Tetsu Nakamura; Wikipedia: Fall of Kabul (2021); Omaid Sharifi interview in The Guardian, 7 September 2021.
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