The Photoville Festival in Brooklyn is now showing a set of stark, black-and-white photographs made by two Afghan cousins who say they cannot risk using their real names. Curator Edith Arance presented the work after first finding it online, and she is now presenting it at the festival through May 30, alongside translations of the cousins’ captions and poems.
Arance said she encountered the cousins’ photographs on Instagram and began a working relationship with them through the platform. She later brought the series to Madrid in November 2024, at her Galería Sura, which focuses on emerging photographers from Southwest Asia and Africa. In her description of how the images function, Arance said she is drawn to the way the cousins merge bleak, everyday surroundings with messages that range from the poetic to the political.
The cousins, who live in a remote Afghan mountain farming village, use pseudonyms — Mahnaz Ebrahimi and Somayeh Ebrahimi — and Arance said they fear Taliban retribution. The NPR report says Mahnaz Ebrahimi was born in 2000 and Somayeh Ebrahimi was born in 2001, and that both and their families are Hazara and Shia Muslims. Before the Taliban regained power in 2021, the report says they worked as carpet weavers in Kabul, and afterward they left, seeking refuge from repression and persecution permitted under Taliban rule.
Arance said neither cousin had any training in photography when they began taking pictures on their cellphones in or around 2022. She described the images as auto-fiction, using the literary term to convey that the photographs combine autobiography with fiction. In Arance’s view, the poses and the way the subjects interact with natural elements suggest internal dreams and fantasies that are staged before the camera.
The series includes photos that question the highly constricted lives of women under Taliban rule through dramatic contrast in light, shadow, and movement. In one image, a bicyclist is shown with a dark, flowing burka that covers her from head to ankles and includes a title, “It will not stand in my way.” Another shows a figure swirling so fast that the billowing fabric appears to lift her into the air, with Farsi text on a brick wall reading, “I dreamed that my homeland was prosperous.”
Some images also build political meaning through more explicit symbolism. In “The Music of Poverty and Violence,” a burka-draped figure holds an automatic rifle on her shoulder as if it were a violin, posed to suggest an improvised performance. Arance said she also reads the images through techniques associated with magic realism, pointing to the way the cousins use elements such as trees, leaves, plants and butterflies as symbols.
Several photos in the series connect the cousins’ dreams to the legal and practical limits placed on girls and women. In “Liberation,” the report says the accompanying poem is written by Mahnaz Ebrahimi and includes lines about freeing herself from oppression and darkness to the height of the sky. In “Girl by the Door,” Arance said the image emphasizes contrasts in light and shadow: the report describes a girl holding a tattered schoolbook with half her face hidden by a pale wooden door with chains, while the caption text ties the scene to a new Taliban law prohibiting education for females after sixth grade.
Arance’s comments connect the art to an argument about what women’s lives are made to look like — and what the cousins want to imagine instead. She said the photos declare that “The Taliban may say that this is the destiny of women in Afghanistan, but I’m saying this is not my destiny,” and she framed the series as showing that even under constraints there are moments of “youthful delight” and aspirational glints.
The show’s selection also includes images that make that contrast visible through everyday gestures, rather than only through references to violence or formal restrictions. “When Will We Laugh From the Bottom of Our Hearts Again” shows a girl wearing sunglasses and laughing, while “Autumn Games” shows three young girls throwing leaves into the air. Other images depict public silence and interior resistance: “Vestiges of the Present” includes a woman shown from the shoulders down holding a boombox, with text in the caption reminding viewers that music, dancing and singing are prohibited for women in public in Afghanistan.
Taken together, the photographs are presented not as documentary proof in the usual sense, but as a blend of testimony and imagined scenes. Arance said the cousins’ autobiographical backdrop and the physical and natural surroundings function as a staging ground for fantasy and longing, with captions and poems written by the cousins and translated by Arance. The series is on view through May 30 at Photoville Festival in Brooklyn.