District 5 by Naemat Wardak
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $4860.00 USD
Status: available
“District 5” is an oil painting rooted in my childhood memories of Kabul. I use fractured geometric forms, layered earth tones, and broken architectural lines to reconstruct a neighbourhood shaped by war, memory, and time. The marks suggest damaged walls and streets, but also the structures people continued to rebuild around them. I did not want to paint destruction literally. I wanted to paint how a place stays inside you after you leave it the fragments you remember, the things you cannot fully explain, and the ordinary life that existed alongside them. For me, this work is both a personal memory and a document of Kabul. It is an original oil on canvas, built through layered surfaces and deliberate geometric fragmentation, giving the painting a physical sense of history and depth.
Why collect this work?
District 5 makes passage conspicuous but unresolved: a broad stair rises through the composition, then stops at a platform without delivering a clear destination. The neighbourhood is structured around movement while resisting secure orientation.
- Wardak identifies childhood memories of Kabul as the work’s source and says he avoided literal destruction. This reported intention frames the altered architecture as recollection rather than a dependable record of the district.
- The photograph shows tall, overlapping blocks crowded around the stair, with tiny dark apertures scattered across vivid façades. Mountains remain visible at the right, but floating circular forms and conflicting scales unsettle any straightforward city view.
- Catalogued as oil on canvas, the painting combines sharply bounded colour fields with gradual modulation. The latter gives the overhead spheres apparent volume, separating their ambiguous presence from the flatter architectural masses.
- The work provides a focused way to consider how memory preserves routes and landmarks while breaking their spatial connections. Its inaccessible stair makes that difference between remembered place and usable map materially clear.
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.
