Afghan artist dons armour to counter men’s street harassment
by Emma Graham-Harrison
The Guardian
12 March 2015
Kubra Khademi”™s eight-minute walk in Kabul wearing steel armour that emphasised her body shape inspires anger and death threats
It took a month for Kubra Khademi to get the armour made exactly to her design; hours spent with a quiet, patient metalworker who usually made stoves.
The performance artist was an unusual customer on a street of dusty workshops in Kabul, where she chose her craftsman for his lack of curiosity about the outrageous steel plates she sketched out.
In a deeply conservative country where women are expected to shroud their figure and almost every inch of bare skin beyond hands, face and feet, she wanted steel armour that slipped over and emphasised her breasts, belly, crotch and bottom.
“He was a quiet man,” she recalls. “He didn”™t question me at first, maybe because of my attitude. Then he asked: “˜What the hell is it?”™, because other people were asking him.”
It was in fact part of a vanishing occurrence in the Afghan capital: a piece of performance art, planned by 27-year-old Khademi. The armour would be both protection and a defiant rebuke to the men whose groping hands and leering remarks make Kabul”™s streets uncomfortable for almost any woman who walks them unchaperoned.
It was also an almost unimaginable provocation in a city where pornography may be avidly consumed in private, but women”™s appearance is fiercely policed in public. Her performance lasted less than 10 minutes, but pictures soon ricocheted around social media, drawing anger and death threats – genuine worries in a country where women have been murdered for working as news anchors, actors and singers.
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