Afghanistan series

Digital illustrations, 84 cm x 118 cm, 2022
Collaborating with photographer Giles Duley—ensuring people’s voices are heard.

Brussels, early 2021. I received a call from Giles Duley. He told me about a collaboration he wanted us to develop around Afghanistan. We had started working together a few months earlier on a series of portraits of South Sudanese women, and were already preparing a more ambitious project.

Giles explained that he was planning to return to Kabul that July—his first time back in Afghanistan since a cold morning in February 2011, when he stepped on an IED. The explosion left him a triple amputee, with only one arm intact. At the time, he had believed it would be his last visit to the country.

But now, the plan was to return.

He shared more about the project: to revisit the Emergency hospital in Kabul, alongside photographer Emma Francis, to create a new series of portraits. From there, we would collaborate on murals and video installations to be presented globally in October, marking the twentieth anniversary of the start of the war.

The context, however, had already begun to shift. When US special representative Zalmay Khalilzad signed a peace agreement with the Taliban in Doha on 29 February 2020, it felt like a turning point. In that move, then-US president Donald Trump had effectively legitimised the Taliban while sidelining the Afghan government, which had been excluded from the negotiations. The prospect of the Taliban’s return to power no longer seemed distant—it felt inevitable.

Afghanistan was already a forgotten war, and it seemed likely to slip even further from political and media attention once the last US troops withdrew. The first half of 2021 saw a near-record number of civilian casualties; May and June alone recorded the highest figures for those months since the UN began tracking them in 2009. It was a stark indication of the escalation underway, as the Taliban offensive intensified across rural areas.

Through this project, our hope was to draw attention to the realities faced by civilians living through the conflict.

Alongside the portraits, Giles kept a visual and written diary. Even so, none of us anticipated the speed at which the country would begin to collapse. History, when it moves, does so quickly—and without hesitation.