0:00:00.000,0:00:02.304
(Applause)

0:00:02.304,0:00:06.083
So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebels

0:00:06.083,0:00:07.431
to the battle for Jalalabad

0:00:07.431,0:00:11.690
as a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida.

0:00:11.690,0:00:12.873
(Laughter)

0:00:12.873,0:00:15.483
I traded my Converse black low-tops

0:00:15.483,0:00:17.397
for a pair of brown leather sandals

0:00:17.397,0:00:19.848
and launched a rocket towards government tanks

0:00:19.848,0:00:21.514
that I couldn't even see.

0:00:21.514,0:00:25.115
And this was my first time in Afghanistan.

0:00:25.115,0:00:27.520
Long before that I had grown up with the war,

0:00:27.520,0:00:31.055
but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer games

0:00:31.055,0:00:34.693
and fistfights with racist children of the Confederacy

0:00:34.693,0:00:36.877
and religio-nationalist demonstrations

0:00:36.877,0:00:40.095
chanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan,"

0:00:40.095,0:00:44.894
and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant.

0:00:44.894,0:00:47.085
But this is the geography of self.

0:00:47.085,0:00:49.813
And so I stand here today,

0:00:49.813,0:00:53.203
Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God,

0:00:53.203,0:00:54.447
(Laughter)

0:00:54.447,0:00:57.614
an atheist and a radically politicized artist

0:00:57.614,0:01:00.264
who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan

0:01:00.264,0:01:02.146
for the last nine years.

0:01:02.146,0:01:05.088
Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you could

0:01:05.088,0:01:07.001
make art about in Afghanistan,

0:01:07.001,0:01:09.913
but personally I don't want to paint rainbows;

0:01:09.913,0:01:12.780
I want to make art that disturbs identity

0:01:12.780,0:01:14.814
and challenges authority

0:01:14.814,0:01:16.430
and exposes hypocrisy

0:01:16.430,0:01:18.281
and reinterprets reality

0:01:18.281,0:01:20.964
and even uses kind of an imaginative ethnography

0:01:20.964,0:01:25.692
to try and understand the world that we live in.

0:01:25.692,0:01:30.138
I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangster

0:01:30.138,0:01:33.344
who wears his jihad against the communists

0:01:33.344,0:01:34.881
like popstar bling

0:01:34.881,0:01:38.864
and uses armed religious intimidation and political corruption

0:01:38.864,0:01:40.863
to make himself rich.

0:01:40.863,0:01:46.862
(Laughter)

0:01:46.862,0:01:53.215
And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliament

0:01:53.215,0:01:54.995
and do a public installation campaign

0:01:54.995,0:01:58.215
with the slogan: "Vote for me! I've done jihad, and I'm rich."

0:01:58.215,0:01:59.494
(Laughter)

0:01:59.494,0:02:02.899
And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiosos

0:02:02.899,0:02:07.514
who are masquerading as national heroes.

0:02:07.514,0:02:10.992
I want to look into corruption in Afghanistan

0:02:10.992,0:02:13.477
through a work called "Payback"

0:02:13.477,0:02:15.425
and impersonate a police officer,

0:02:15.425,0:02:19.624
set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars,

0:02:19.624,0:02:23.359
but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them money

0:02:23.359,0:02:26.342
and apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department --

0:02:26.342,0:02:32.927
(Applause)

0:02:32.927,0:02:41.805
and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf.

0:02:44.094,0:02:46.282
I want to look at how, in my opinion,

0:02:46.282,0:02:49.964
the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic.

0:02:49.964,0:02:52.214
The war and the expatriate life that comes with it

0:02:52.214,0:02:56.614
have created this environment of style and fashion

0:02:56.614,0:02:58.980
that can only be described

0:02:58.980,0:03:02.400
through creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bombers

0:03:02.400,0:03:07.280
where I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacket

0:03:07.280,0:03:09.568
or make multiple interior pockets

0:03:09.568,0:03:14.687
on fashionable neo-traditional vests.

0:03:14.687,0:03:20.370
And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrow

0:03:20.370,0:03:24.359
and putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899

0:03:24.359,0:03:30.054
to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiatives

0:03:30.054,0:03:32.903
being rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoric

0:03:32.903,0:03:34.438
about a "white man's burden"

0:03:34.438,0:03:37.237
to save the brown man from himself

0:03:37.237,0:03:41.688
and maybe even civilize him a bit.

0:03:41.688,0:03:45.130
But doing these things, they can get you in jail,

0:03:45.130,0:03:49.172
they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted.

0:03:49.172,0:03:51.030
But I do them because I have to,

0:03:51.030,0:03:53.697
because the geography of self mandates it.

0:03:53.697,0:03:57.611
That is my burden. What's yours?

0:03:57.611,0:03:59.277
Thank you.

0:03:59.292,0:04:06.315
(Applause)