City of wail by Naemat Wardak
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 50 x 60 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $6870.00 USD
Status: available
“City of Wail” is my personal response to Kabul, a city I grew up inside, not simply observed from a distance. I use oil, fractured forms, and a dark, restrained palette to transform destruction into a psychological landscape. Beneath the broken architecture are traces of memory, history, and ordinary life that refuse to disappear. I wanted the painting to hold both grief and dignity, not a documentary image of war, but a lasting portrait of what remains after it. For collectors, the work offers a piece of contemporary Afghan memory, built through symbolism rather than literal representation.
Why collect this work?
City of wail organizes Kabul as a collision of architectural fragments, open terrain, and hovering spheres, making dislocation legible through scale and spatial discontinuity rather than direct reportage.
- Wardak states that memories of growing up in Afghanistan guide his use of fragmented geometry. In this painting, that approach positions the city as recollection shaped and rearranged over time, not a mapped location.
- In the supplied photograph, a small standing figure occupies the lower right while a tower, block-like buildings, and mountains compete across abrupt shifts in depth. The figure supplies a human measure, but no continuous route connects the surrounding spaces.
- The documented oil-on-canvas medium supports broad, bounded areas of teal, red, ochre, and dark brown. Subtle tonal modelling rounds the suspended forms, setting their apparent volume against the flattened architecture.
- Dated 2025 and measuring 50 by 60 cm, the work provides a focused case for examining how contemporary Afghan memory can be pictured without turning Kabul into either documentary evidence or an emblem of conflict alone.
About the Artist
Naemat Wardak
Naemat Wardak is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Kabul, AF.
Nationality: Afghan
I paint because there are things I remember that I cannot fully put into words.
