Power also sweats: Kubra Khademi's political orgy shakes Arco

MadridA frenzy of fingers and lips, in what will be one of the most talked-about works of the new edition of Arco, the art fair held in Madrid. The artist and performer Afghan artist Kubra Khademi (1989) presents a political statement with a painting of an orgy featuring a dozen world leaders, including Angela Merkel, Kamala Harris, Ursula von der Leyen, Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, and Benazir Bhutto. With this scene, Khademi proposes dismantling, through "love," a patriarchy based on "hatred, destruction, bombs, and the exercise of absolute power over others," as the artist herself states. Khademi sought refuge in France when international forces withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. "The orgy scene is both utopian and dystopian, but what I want to show is that love is everywhere. To imagine another world, it must be based on love," emphasizes the artist, whose work is currently on display at the Eric Mouchet Gallery. The scene is set in a bathhouse, the only place where Afghan women can have any privacy.

But Khademi is no naivety: her project, which forms part of the orgy scene, originated in the disappointment she felt when she received no response to a "desperate" open letter she wrote to world leaders pleading for help in combating the loss of the most basic rights that the Taliban's return represented. "I was very sad, and I was in shock when I saw that politicians were letting it happen and saying nothing," she laments. "I thought I knew many people in Europe and that they would publish my letter, but no one did. My despair turned into a great sadness and disappointment, and I told myself not to read it, but to see it."

"I firmly believe that if one woman is not free, no other woman is. Likewise, if one human being is not free, how can others consider themselves free?" Khademi says. “If women with power and knowledge cannot speak out, it means they are also like the women of Afghanistan: they too are silenced, they too are imprisoned by invisible chains,” she emphasizes. That is why, in another of the group paintings, she depicts them carrying a staff and parting the waters before them, and in a third, reproducing the painting Liberty Leading the People"With the quote in Delacroix's painting, I address the question of freedom in the world. I try to imagine a dystopian world. Why does it seem that way to me? Because I'm talking about how, if we want to change things, if women want to change things and want to take action, that very desire already seems dystopian," she says.

Khademi also portrayed each of these politicians almost life-size, nude, and herself as well. Nudity is a symbol of the abolition of political borders, and all the portraits feature the slogan that Afghan women chanted at demonstrations: "Pa, work, freedom." When Khademi painted these women, she considered not only their power but also their knowledge. "Benazir Bhutto, who was the Prime Minister of India, was assassinated. Margaret Thatcher had died, but both were aware of the complexities of the events that led Afghanistan to this Soviet-era situation. Angela Merkel was already retired, but her knowledge doesn't matter because it couldn't be used to advance the rights of Afghan women," Khademi says.