Kabul’s Geometric Dawn by Naemat Wardak
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $4820.00 USD
Status: available
I painted this because Kabul is still inside me. I grew up with its streets, its colors, its dust, its noise, and its scars. Some of what I remember is beautiful. Some of it still hurts. I don’t always know where memory ends and the city begins. The broken shapes in my paintings come from that feeling. I see Kabul in pieces, in rooftops, walls, empty spaces, and fragments of places I remember. I use color and layers to hold those memories together, because I know I cannot hold on to the city itself. This is not a painting of a ruined Kabul. It is a painting of the Kabul I carry with me. I paint it because I am afraid of forgetting. And because, no matter how much has been taken from it, Kabul is still alive in me.
Why collect this work?
A split foreground and mismatched celestial forms make dawn less a new beginning than a city remembered through competing spatial systems.
- Wardak writes that Kabul remains within him and that he paints against forgetting. This stated purpose frames the abstraction as personal recollection, though the painting’s effects depend on its formal construction.
- In the photograph, a salmon plane drives inward between a striped incline and clustered volumes. Above, an orange orb and a pale disk occupy separate visual zones, preventing the scene from settling into one coherent horizon.
- The documented oil on canvas is handled here to alternate sharply bounded colour areas with soft modelling. The rounded bodies gain apparent volume, while adjacent rectangles remain emphatically flat.
- Dated 2025, this 40 by 50 cm painting sharpens a question relevant to collections of place and migration: how can a city persist when resemblance gives way to fragments, routes and colour relations?
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.
