The Afghan-Iranian artist narrowly escaped from Kabul to Paris last August, as the Taliban took over. She talks about the terror of that time, why she still longs for home, and her work photographing Afghan women in exile in France
When the US government signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, the Afghan-Iranian artist, photographer and activist Fatimah Hossaini thought little of it. People warned her, of course. The Americans will leave Afghanistan, they said, and all kinds of trouble will follow. But she hardly listened. Life in Kabul, where she had been working since 2018, felt so full and free, it was all but impossible to imagine the clock turning back.
The simple fact was that she had lived with more day-to-day restrictions in Tehran, where she was born and grew up, than she had ever had to put up with in Kabul (her Afghan grandparents fled to Iran in the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan war). “Life was good,” she says. “In Tehran, people are a little depressed with the situation. But in Kabul there was so much hope and desire. A new generation was burning with it. I could see women in every sector: musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, politicians. I could teach my classes at the university without a hijab. I could show my students any image I liked. These things would never happen in Iran.”
A portrait of the artist and photographer Fatimah Hossaini by Maryam Firuzi, 2022
