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(Applause)

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So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebels

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to the battle for Jalalabad

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as a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida.

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(Laughter)

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I traded my Converse black low-tops

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for a pair of brown leather sandals

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and launched a rocket towards government tanks

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that I couldn't even see.

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And this was my first time in Afghanistan.

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Long before that I had grown up with the war,

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but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer games

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and fistfights with racist children of the Confederacy

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and religio-nationalist demonstrations

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chanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan,"

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and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant.

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But this is the geography of self.

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And so I stand here today,

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Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God,

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(Laughter)

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an atheist and a radically politicized artist

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who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan

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for the last nine years.

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Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you could

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make art about in Afghanistan,

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but personally I don't want to paint rainbows;

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I want to make art that disturbs identity

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and challenges authority

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and exposes hypocrisy

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and reinterprets reality

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and even uses kind of an imaginative ethnography

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to try and understand the world that we live in.

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I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangster

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who wears his jihad against the communists

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like popstar bling

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and uses armed religious intimidation and political corruption

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to make himself rich.

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(Laughter)

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And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliament

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and do a public installation campaign

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

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(Laughter)

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And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiosos

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who are masquerading as national heroes.

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I want to look into corruption in Afghanistan

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through a work called "Payback"

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and impersonate a police officer,

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set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars,

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but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them money

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and apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department --

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(Applause)

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and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf.

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I want to look at how, in my opinion,

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the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic.

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The war and the expatriate life that comes with it

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have created this environment of style and fashion

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that can only be described

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through creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bombers

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where I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacket

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or make multiple interior pockets

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on fashionable neo-traditional vests.

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And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrow

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and putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899

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to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiatives

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being rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoric

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about a "white man's burden"

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to save the brown man from himself

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and maybe even civilize him a bit.

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But doing these things, they can get you in jail,

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they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted.

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But I do them because I have to,

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because the geography of self mandates it.

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That is my burden. What's yours?

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Thank you.

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(Applause)