Amina Dryabee: Determinism and Free Will

18 August – 20 September 2020

Amina Dryabee’s work Determinism and Free Will, 2019 offers a philosophical reflection on our forms of knowledge and destinies. Is life predetermined, or do we have agency to control our futures? As we emerge from COVID lockdown to new horizons of thought, her work makes manifest the cycle of writing and erasure of histories. Within the artists’ context in Afghanistan, this question is particularly poignant for women, as much of CCAA’s work revolves around empowering young people through training in the medium of video and the visual arts.

Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA), Kabul is a civil society organisation. It was founded in 2004 by a number of young artists in an attempt to open up a proactive dialogue with the international community and reinstate the country’s art institutions after the governmental changes in 2002. The main goal of CCAA is to provide equal opportunities both for men and women to improve their artistic talents and upgrade their role within a patriarchal and theoretical frame of the arts.

The Artists Film International 2020 programme responds to the theme of language. Local sounds, rituals and political realities feature, from the rhythms and images of a Bahamian Junkanoo to the contested ancestral lands on the desert border between Mexico and the USA.