(Applause)
So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebels
to the battle for Jalalabad
as a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida.
(Laughter)
I traded my Converse black low-tops
for a pair of brown leather sandals
and launched a rocket towards government tanks
that I couldn't even see.
And this was my first time in Afghanistan.
Long before that I had grown up with the war,
but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer games
and fistfights with racist children of the Confederacy
and religio-nationalist demonstrations
chanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan,"
and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant.
But this is the geography of self.
And so I stand here today,
Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God,
(Laughter)
an atheist and a radically politicized artist
who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan
for the last nine years.
Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you could
make art about in Afghanistan,
but personally I don't want to paint rainbows;
I want to make art that disturbs identity
and challenges authority
and exposes hypocrisy
and reinterprets reality
and even uses kind of an imaginative ethnography
to try and understand the world that we live in.
I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangster
who wears his jihad against the communists
like popstar bling
and uses armed religious intimidation and political corruption
to make himself rich.
(Laughter)
And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliament
and do a public installation campaign
with the slogan: "Vote for me! I've done jihad, and I'm rich."
(Laughter)
And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiosos
who are masquerading as national heroes.
I want to look into corruption in Afghanistan
through a work called "Payback"
and impersonate a police officer,
set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars,
but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them money
and apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department --
(Applause)
and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf.
I want to look at how, in my opinion,
the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic.
The war and the expatriate life that comes with it
have created this environment of style and fashion
that can only be described
through creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bombers
where I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacket
or make multiple interior pockets
on fashionable neo-traditional vests.
And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrow
and putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899
to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiatives
being rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoric
about a "white man's burden"
to save the brown man from himself
and maybe even civilize him a bit.
But doing these things, they can get you in jail,
they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted.
But I do them because I have to,
because the geography of self mandates it.
That is my burden. What's yours?
Thank you.
(Applause)