part of how I work and part of how I'm
interested in working and and even when
I first started making art it was more
about the process process has always for
me been key so it's the process of
research the process of exploration into
a particular idea payback essentially
came from discussions of corruption and
bribes to the police I figured okay well
let's try and buy police uniforms in the
market and set up a fake checkpoint on a
main road in Kabul that leads out to the
airport and the idea was to stop cars
check their papers check their trunks
but in the end rather than asking them
for a bribe actually give them money
back it went incredibly smoothly like
way more smoothly than I think they ever
anticipated my name is Aman Magette IDI
I work as a visual artist I'm very
influenced by my environment which is
why I've gotten very much into site
specific installation projects I've done
projects in India Dubai UK at the
Imperial War Museum north I don't really
have that much of a workspace anymore
and since a lot of what I do or these
site-specific projects I kind of
conceptualize from home but all of the
kind of actual installation production
and material sourcing all happens on
site I was born in Jacksonville Florida
to Afghan parents my uncle became
president of Afghanistan for a very
brief period of time until he passed the
baton to the next person in line my
first time going to Afghanistan I'm with
some of the Magi Dean of my uncle's
militia and I think it was the first
time that I also looked and I said okay
I might be Afghan but I'm not that kind
of Afghan I really got interested in
kind of biculturalism and people refer
to me as Afghan American what is that -
actually trying to express or Kari in
terms of one's identity I ended up doing
all of my studies in cultural
anthropology and I use ideas and
theories of cultural anthropology as
well as ethnographic methods in
views qualitative research to create
artworks one of the things you hear a
lot when you're when you're in Avalon
has done particularly from people who
fought in the jihad against the Soviet
Union in the 80s you hear them say I did
you hug for ten years and so I deserve X
Y & Z you see these ostentatious houses
that belong to some of these Johnny
gangsters you see these guys within
politics and so that's when I started to
think about bling in the West and the
whole notion of bling and how it's also
used for showing one's kind of position
in 2009 I came up with this project
called conflict bling where I kind of
blinged out a prosthetic leg several
different objects and then once I did
that work I kind of started to think
about who would be wearing this conflict
bling right you know none other than say
a jihadi gangster right so I kind of
came up with this persona of some of the
real jihadi gangsters that you would
come across enough on his own it was a
series of kind of nice on send photos of
the jihadi gangster in different
scenarios around town so a lot of it was
trying to kind of like explore the ways
in which a sense of jihadism could be
equated with this very Western
understanding of gold bling the kind of
final culmination of the jihadi gangster
series was a faux run for Parliament for
this character jihad a gangster so you
have here vote for me I've done jihad
and I'm rich in the face here
cheerleading hiya jihadi Shema so your
favorite jihadi face here so that people
could actually put in whatever jihadi
they had in mind that they thought was
the most corrupt or the most violent so
the whole poster is modeled on actual
posters in Afghanistan and usually it's
a rainbow or a flag or a sky in the red
black and green and so minor obviously
dollar signs and ak-47s and this one did
apparently raise the attention of the
authorities and the Electoral Commission
in Kabul they found the work to be
insulting to national heroes there was
an investigation that started but very
quickly the Electoral Commission found
themselves having to deal with actual
instances of fraud and problems with the
elections you know and so this kind of
issue
fell off very quickly
you know visually these things are
really great cuz you go in there I mean
there's tons of stuff the Afghan by
blood redneck by the grace of God was
trying to point a finger at the
absurdity of some of the US presence in
the country you know so many Americans
that I had met who were from I don't
know Kentucky Nebraska back home they
would be complete racists against Athens
but here they're making tons of money as
part of this you know war economy and so
now they're living in this same place I
wanted to kind of put this character in
these very kind of traditional locales
just to create that very odd
juxtapositioning between the two there's
this kind of guerrilla tactics that you
just kind of go out it you just kind of
do it this one was a Afghan fried
chicken and I think what's interesting
about this one is that a lot of folks
when they when they look at this when
they look at this you know there's not a
lot that you can see unless you start to
look closely it at some of the writing
go you know on the wall there or in the
sign here even the Afghan Fried Chicken
is quite subtle you know in the box and
on the side to tell you that it's
actually you know in Afghanistan in
Kabul there is a lot of sarcastic humor
that comes through in the work that I've
done George Bernard Shaw says if you're
going to tell the truth you better make
people laugh otherwise they'll kill you
there's a lot of truth to that idea so
perhaps part of why I use humor in some
of the works was to kind of negotiate
that to navigate that potential danger
that I might have been putting myself in
by addressing these highly sensitive
issues conflict chic one and two was
essentially trying to look at that way
in which war can become glamorized but
through fashion there's the one for
soldiers and then you have the suicide
bombers so a part of that was how so
much of the media was so interested in
what was going on in that place not just
because it was Avalon has done but
because of the war that was happening
there it was the conflict that drew
people there you know I stayed based in
Kabul until the end of 2013 which is
when then I came and settled in Paris it
was after that that a real shift kind of
happen
in my work where I kind of moved more
into site specific installation we're
dealing with more broader kind of global
politics so a big part of it was to
force myself out and really kind of like
challenge myself to see what other kinds
of works I could I could create a lot of
our closest friends here are actually
friends that we made in Kabul who have
now kind of relocated back to France
both Afghan and French
you've always had kind of a heightened
police presence in this area you have a
lot of people getting stopped their
papers getting checked what I've been
working on a lot is looking at kind of
migration politics in the last couple of
years and I did a residency in Dubai
where I kind of explored the politics of
migrant construction workers since then
now I did a site specific project that
dealt with migration but through the
lens of departing Guantanamo Bay
detainees essentially what I found
really interesting about detainees who
were leaving Guantanamo Bay is that many
of them their home countries don't
accept them back and so what happens is
you have the u.s. trying to find
countries who will give them political
asylum so I was interested in this kind
of very twisted and distorted migration
story commodified looking at this kind
of commodification of conflict that I
did in the Gift Shop of the Imperial War
Museum North in Manchester basically I
had these alternative merchandise
products you know on my table which was
within eyeshot of the actual gift shop
of the Imperial War Museum people found
it to be offensive trivializing the
trauma of war so there were a couple of
days where the director of the museum
was like well I don't know it became a
bit dubious as to whether I was actually
gonna be able to do the work after the
exhibition was over I was invited back
for a panel discussion and the same
director came up to me and said in the
end your installation ended up being one
of the most popular ones because it
generated the most discussion so it was
very interesting to see how it went from
almost being censored to actually being
kind of lauded by the museum as one of
the more intriguing pieces of the show I
haven't used a lot of humor and other
projects that I've done since then I
don't know if I was to do a work now
that used humor to try and address the
kind of recent attacks in Paris I don't
even know if it would
work since the Charlie Hebdo attacks I
become asked if I live here and if I do
if I have proof or evidence of it so I'm
being asked to show my kind of residency
card now when I come and go I did have
issue recently trying to buy a plane
ticket I was trying to buy the exact
same ticket that my wife was buying and
she was able to make her purchase and I
wasn't her name being very very
typically French name and my name not
essentially you have a lot of Muslims
living in these neighborhoods who become
really concerned right about what what
are gonna be the repercussions what are
gonna be the attitudes towards them
through everything that's going on I
think that's gonna become fodder for
creating maybe interesting projects
having seen how things evolved in the
u.s. after 9/11 heightened kind of like
fear that then eventually became a bit
more diluted and more kind of reasonable
and rational I'll be curious to see what
kind of trajectory things take here over
time