Afghanistan is a new exhibition of film-based photographs by Ruvan Wijesooriya. The photos were shot over two weeks in April 2011 while on varying assignments for Roots of Peace and in transit between Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan. The pictures - on view from today through 30th June at Rogue 58, 555 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, New York - reveal details of Afghan life, including women in private places, landscapes, children at school, men at work, and more.

Press Release

“AFGHANISTAN” Hosted By Rouge 58 and Kyleigh Kuhn, photos by Ruvan Wijesooriya

(Brooklyn, NY - June 23, 2011) Afghanistan, hosted by Kyleigh Kuhn featuring photographs by Ruvan Wijesooriya, presents a work-in-progress in the form of a slideshow and conversation. The photos were shot on film over two weeks in April 2011 while on varying assignments for Roots of Peace and in transit between Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan.

The pictures reveal details of Afghan life; women in private places, landscapes, children at school, men at work. The yearbook is not only a fascinating documentation of 230 children in color portraits; it becomes a gender study within a conceptual art project. The individual photographs vary to include things like a mountainside with thousands of white marks on its face from where landmines have been removed; a black and white portrait featuring a child wearing a shirt saying, “D&G, Dreams and Glamour” comments on the global economy.

The images are not what you would expect to see in most publications dealing with documentary and travel photography. The work comfortably straddles the classic and the modern in its understanding of a less orientalist, desensitized post-ironic world democratized by image-making and access to information, and its individual citizens who increasingly define themselves through photographs

On view through June 30 at Rouge 58
555 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.rouge58.com

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