On a small screen inside a low-ceilinged room in a gothic hospice – now a museum – there were feet marching to a war beat; feet striding confidently in front of a brick wall; one foot hopping across the screen; finally, a pair treading cautiously – one outfitted with an artificial limb. In the background, a rustic machine was pounding away, perhaps producing prosthetics. The haunting video encapsulates all the violence, terror, pain and irreversibility of war. Rahraw Omarzad's Gaining and Losing featured at the 2012 Documenta, an international art exhibition organised every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Elsewhere, inside an elegant hall in a grand palace, the Kassel Fridericianum, a film screen simultaneously showed two young women gliding through two different palaces: the Fridericianum itself and Kabul's Darul Aman – both depicted in states of void and semi-decay. The images conjured the unsettling architectural and historical parallels of the two locations.
The Fridericianum, constructed as a princely palace and a public museum after the French Revolution, later housed a 19th century provincial parliament, and was almost completely destroyed by the Allied Forces' bombs during World War II. Similarly, Kabul's palace, built on the outskirts of the city by King Amanullah Khan in the 1920s, was meant to house Afghanistan's first parliament. It was repeatedly destroyed by fires and in the 1990s became the site of battles among rival factions of the mujahideen. Mariam Ghani's A Brief History of Collapses – which also featured at the Documenta – captures the eerie beauty of the two buildings. Like Omarzad's film, it is a haunting condemnation of destruction. To support the visuals of the film, Mariam and her father Ashraf Ghani – former Finance Minister in the Karzai government – have put together a history of Afghanistan in the form of a pocket encyclopaedia.
At the corner of another museum in Munich, an exhibition is stacked with bombproof sandbags. In the background, voices recount the impressions of German combatants stationed in Kabul, Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif, where they have been deployed as NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops. The soldiers – women and men – speak of their daily routine, their interaction with Afghan colleagues, the unanticipated hospitality, the beauty of the country, and their fear of the hostile environment. Soundtracks accompany the exhibition, which draws on artefacts from the museum's collections.