Azad translates to liberation in many Central and South Asian languages such as Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Pashto, Urdu and Hindi.

This website is intended to document my visual art and creative projects.  And I will be using this site to give a social context to the work that I am doing and plan to do in the future.

Enjoy and contact me if you have any questions or comments ~

Laimah Osman

I had my Thesis Exhibition at Pratt Institute on May 17th, 2010.  You can view selected pieces from the exhibition in the Art section of this website.

I titled this show Bismillah because I said this phrase often while I was putting the show together. It was a difficult to put together because I had to face many pictures of the wreckage and violation that is war.  I appropriated these pictures from newspapers to show how I read the images as an Afghan-American who has been impacted by war. I was both curious and nervous to see how people read my interpretations. So I said Bismillah a lot. Bismillah is the most basic prayer for Muslims meaning in the name of Allah.  And it is often said in times of distress.

I also called this show Pictures in Newspapers because all the work I made, mural, montages, cutouts, artist books were based in pictures I found in mainstream newspapers about the War On Terror. Looking at how the mainstream media presents the War On Terror is an interesting practice in itself. I was able to identify patterns of representation that have formed into a powerful popular iconography – stereotyping Muslim men as violent extremists and women as disappearing victims. Here’s a little writeup from the brochure that went with the show :::

As an Afghan-American my perspective on the War on Terror is complex. Pictures of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are rich material for me. I don’t process these pictures as having fixed messages but look for the “surplus value” seeping outside the frame. On a basic level, pictures are a way for me to connect to Afghanistan, my country of birth. They are way for me to bridge the great physical distance between my current home and my past. I search the picture and look for clues that trigger memories and my imagination. Physical distance is hard, an absolute, but psychological distance is soft and can travel great distances and time.

I still have many copies of the xeroxed brochure for this show. If you are interested contact me and I can mail you one.)  Also, I would like to thank Wazhmah Osman, Kara O’Connell-Williams, Solange Roberdeau and Ms. Leah Word for making this exhibition possible.

I am a Brooklyn based Afghan-American artist.

I explore politics of representation as they tie to culture, race and gender. I work instinctively and select my media carefully and allow it to help shape the forms I make.