Kabul 2, 3, 4 developed from a simple plan: to track the visible reconstructions undergone by the city during the period of post-conflict intervention by driving through the city once each year and recording that drive on video. I put this plan into practice in December 2002, December 2003, and October 2004. The simple passage of the camera was often able to register the near-seismic upheaval of a city in the grip of rapid and radical change: the influx of more than 2 million returned refugees; the skyrocketing values of real estate; the growth of a parallel economy serving international aid workers, along with the bunker mentality that crept across their neighborhoods, blocking off ever more roads from the camera's eye as it went; the political cycles of idealism and disillusionment that produced billboards, monuments, grafitti and riots -- all of these were reflected on the surface of the city. Three years later, I went back to the footage from these three years of filming, and shaped it into a three-channel installation where each channel represents one year and my annual trajectories are, as far as possible, lined up so that they run parallel courses through the city, allowing viewers to see the same places simultaneously in three different stages of their reconstructions, so that the city's transformations (as well as the remnants of its past that remain untouched) can be traced across time and space.

Kabul: Reconstructions explores the multiple manifestations, meanings and resonances of the idea of reconstruction – as both process and metaphor – in the city of Kabul in the last days of 2002. In the Afghan bureaucratic arena, dominated by the jargon and worldview of international NGOs, reconstruction refers to large-scale social and economic development projects meant to build or alter the infrastructure of the country’s administration, production, and regulation. On the local level, meanwhile, reconstruction seems to translate into the literal renovations and new constructions undertaken by individuals as they seek to rebuild the physical city. Finally, for those of us outside Afghanistan, reconstruction comes to mean the process by which we piece together an image of this place and these people from the scraps of information gathered between the lines of mass media transmissions, the memories preserved in expatriate family stories, traditions & recipes, or personal communications from friends and family on the inside.

The video is made up of six different kinds of footage, all shot in Kabul in December 2002 and assembled into a loose database form: road footage from a drive through Kabul’s many neighborhoods and suburbs; scenes from construction sites around the city; carpenters from Nuristan building and hand-carving an ornamental cabinet to furnish my parents’ new Kabul home; dusk falling at the Microrayan, a housing project built – but never finished – during the Soviet era; the women of my family making aushak, a traditional Afghan dish; and a performance where in the absence of my father, who is my own primary link to the country, I decided to dress up in his clothes.

Kabul: Reconstructions was originally produced for a site-specific exhibition at Exit Art in New York, where it was installed on three monitors housed inside a replica of a UNHCR refugee tent. A carpet and pillows were arranged in the tent so that people could sit and watch the video, and one day a week I interacted with visitors to the tent by serving them tea and World Food Programme biscuits while offering to answer their questions about the project and about the current events in and history of Afghanistan. As part of the project, I also invited a group of Afghan-Americans and Afghans (including young journalism students from the AINA Afghan Media Center in Kabul) to revise and update my view of reconstruction by posting video, audio, images, text and links to a communal weblog, which can still be accessed online at www.kabul-reconstructions.net.

After the Exit Art exhibition closed, the website was adapted to add a section called Ask A Question, where viewers could submit their questions about Kabul's reconstruction through an online form. Once a question was submitted, I would use familial diasporic networks to transmit it to Kabul and bring back an answer, thereby enabling the general public to access these alternative sources of information about the Afghan situation that generally remain in the private realm. For over a year, I also maintained a monitor of Western media coverage of the reconstruction in the Follow the Information section of the site, so that visitors could contrast the very different kinds of information provided by these different sources. When the Ask section first went live, I sent an announcement to several listservs, which was forwarded across the Internet, and while the number of questions asked was relatively small (although they were surprisingly interesting and difficult to answer) the website received 50,000 hits in the next 12 months. It was also quickly indexed in major search engines, which meant that accidental viewers (people searching the terms "kabul" or "reconstruction," for example) frequently find their way to the site. While I can no longer spare the time to update the site constantly, I do try every few months to answer the questions that continue to accumulate.
Read the text about Kabul: Reconstructions.

When I returned to Kabul in the winter of 2003-04, the construction sites I had filmed the year before were now busy shops and restaurants, and the city's inhabitants were collectively mulling over the more abstract question of how to rebuild their fragmented democracy, as their new constitution was being debated both in the official arena of the constitutional assembly and over cups of tea and radio waves all over town. Kabul: Constitutions, the second installment of the Kabul project, includes a direct sequel to the three-channel video produced in Kabul: Reconstructions, shot by revisiting the sites, people and streets filmed the year before, and a new video shot in the assembly itself, which became a new interactive installation prototyped during a residency at Eyebeam Atelier. A beta web version of the interactive installation is currently being tested at kabul-reconstructions.net/constitutions. It will be accompanied by analytical interviews and a public dialogue forum. Media coverage of the constitutional assembly is currently archived in the Information section of the main kabul-reconstructions.net site.

The interactive three-channel installation version of Kabul: Constitutions places viewers within the specific moment of the Constitutional Loya Jirga, the national tribal council and constitutional assembly convened under the glare of the media spotlight in a high-tech tent complex on the campus of Kabul Polytechnic University at the beginning of 2004. The installation investigates the question of how our imaginaries of the architectures of democracy overlap with the real spaces where the structures of the state are materially and politically invested and contested by mapping events and issues from the Jirga onto a spatial interface that viewers must navigate to make sense of the video.

That interface is an architectural schematic of the Jirga’s tent complex (including plenary tent, auxiliary tents, security structures, and repurposed campus buildings), stenciled in white onto a 12’ x 17’ sheet of grey industrial carpet (similar to that used to carpet the plenary tent), which has been embedded with sensors at points in the map corresponding to places I filmed within the complex (in the prototype proximity sensors protruding from the map, and now pressure sensors under the carpet). When viewers walk into the installation, they have a blank wall behind them, the map stretching out on the floor in front of them in birds-eye-view, a projection of the auxiliary and peripheral spaces on the left side of the complex on the left wall, a projection of the plenary tent (where the official narrative of the assembly unfolded) on the center wall, and a projection of the auxiliary and peripheral spaces on the right side of the complex on the right wall. Each projection runs in a loop, beginning with 1-5 minute videos from spaces at the top of the map and working its way down to the bottom of the map, then starting from the top again; in the center projection, all the videos take place in the plenary tent, but are divided based on the assigned seating or semi-fixed positions of different actors in the constitutional process (delegates, diplomats, government observers, guests, press, ushers, tea servers and so on). Each projection also has stereo sound that plays through speakers mounted at the corners of wall and ceiling.

As a viewer walks through the installation and on the carpet-map, she triggers sensors that are serially controlling the DVD players linked to the three projections, which then causes the relevant projection to jump to the video of the particular part of the space that she is passing through. The DVDs contains 2.5 total hours of footage, subtitled in English with speakers identified whenever possible, and have a linear running time of about 1.5 hours. During the run of the Eyebeam exhibition of Kabul: Constitutions, I gave weekly "guided tours" of the exhibition – sometimes with co-hosts who attended the Jirga in other roles – during which I encouraged visitors to interact with the video through the spatial interface, further explained the context of events and encounters in the footage, and initiated dialogues about the issues raised by the installation and by the assembly.

The mapped database form of Kabul: Constitutions poses the question: what kind of representation is more faithful to the nature of a political process like a constitutional assembly, especially in an essentially failed state? As an artist who has had unusually privileged access to the “back rooms” of Afghanistan’s post-war politics, I always feel that something is missing from the traditional documentaries that are produced around events like these. In constructing their linear sense, applying the omniscience of hindsight to show you only what proved to be important when the final day was done, those films lose that vital confusion, contradiction and immediacy which mark the actual experience of democracy in construction. It’s really a three-ring circus, gloriously messy, often opaque. There are always simultaneous but disjunctive narratives unfolding in the public and private spaces of the assembly. There are speeches that repeat themselves and each other. There are cameras everywhere, an inflection profoundly felt and rarely seen in media accounts. There are false starts and false promises and long periods of waiting and speculation. It’s history in the present tense, not passing into the past so quickly for those of us not only observing but also invested; the constitution is and will be lived by the people deciding it and the people watching every move on Afghan TV.

I wanted to use the database and interface to preserve all of these elements – in a way, shifting the focus of the work to everything that would be B-roll ("local color") in a traditional documentary – so that the viewer, instead of being fed an understanding of what happened at the assembly, might have the chance to feel what it was like to be there.

Kabul: Constitutions builds on Kabul: Reconstructions, and is also part of a projected series of work investigating the architectures of democracy in places and moments where -- because those democratic processes are in flux, in question or in crisis rather than stable, unthought-of and hence invisible supports – the skeletal structures of the state take on a material presence as invested, contested physical spaces with a shifting address somewhere in the collective national imaginary.

Part 3 of the Kabul Trilogy, Kabul: Selections, investigates the politics of choice during Afghanistan’s first popular election, the presidential election of 2004, through video footage of election preparations, voters at the polls, and interviews in the wake of initial reports.

The interactive installation prototype of Kabul: Selections premiered in fall 2006 as part of the Underfire exhibition in Chicago. An online version of the offline prototype is currently being tested for the web, with a final version expected to launch in winter 2007.

Index of the Disappeared is an ongoing, collaborative, community-based inquiry into the human costs of public policy; the erasures and absences created in real lives by the secrecy and suppression of documents and data; and the role played by language -- not just as spoken by but as spoken about and around communities -- in defining (and potentially re-defining) the rights, struggles, and public perceptions of immigrants in the United States. It has developed over a period of several years in several different forms: a video (How Do You See the Disappeared?); a web project (How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database); an offshoot/nested project including video, prints and postcards (Points of Proof, see below), a series of critical texts and artists' text projects published in various on- and off-line venues; a series of imagined portraits; a 'zine (Index of the Disappeared: Catalogue #.100) with contributions from other artists working with parallel ideas; and finally an installation in the form of a library, Index of the Disappeared, which archives all the previous forms of the project, collects all the documents about and interventions in the immigration debate that we have accumulated over the years, adds a series of books that connect those primary documents to broader ideas and issues circulating in contemporary society and culture, and also serves as a site for the writing and archiving of additional alternative histories.

The Disappeared project began in 2003 as a response to the extreme situation of the special interest detainees, a group of more than seven hundred immigrants, mostly Arab and South Asian Muslims, who were detained by the INS on immigration violations immediately after 9/11/01, classified as "special interest" and remanded to FBI/DOJ custody on the supposed basis of potential connections to the events of 9/11, and finally deported almost three years later -- without ever being charged -- after pressure from human rights watchdogs and an internal DOJ investigation revealed that in almost every case, the special interest classification was derived from pure racial profiling and had no basis in logic or evidence. Advocacy for the special interest detainees was made especially difficult by the blanket gag order applied to their cases by the Department of Justice, which prevented anyone connected with the special interest cases from talking about them, and allowed the DOJ to both block the detainees and their lawyers from knowing the charges or evidence being brought against them, and also to refuse to release their names to the media. Instead a series of lists were disseminated into the public domain in a carefully controlled progression: first a list where almost every identifier was blacked out, then a list where everything but the detainees' nationalities was censored, next a list that revealed the violations for which they had been detained. The blank spaces where these immigrants' names, and the American lives and family ties they represent, had been erased became screens onto which all the fears of the moment could be projected.

The first installment of the project, the video How Do You See the Disappeared (2004, rt 9:28 min), analyzes current U.S. immigration law, a decade of case histories, and media coverage of detention & deportation within the experimental, elliptical framework of a search for the traces of the disappeared in the documents that surround and enclose them, in order to question how the language of the system is implicated in the disappearances it produces and argue for the necessity of a new language to counter this lack. The video contrasts a visual accumulation of official texts with a voiceover and series of punctuating images that carefully and deliberately scale the political back to the personal, the abstract to the specific, and the foreign to the familiar.

The video also served to introduce and prepare the web project How Do You See The Disappeared? A Warm Database, which launched on Turbulence.org in December 2004. At this stage of the project, we identified a new strategy: to create alternative systems for collecting stories from the immigrants whose lives as individuals are lost in the abstractions of legalities and headlines, and to develop from those stories new terms and languages through which the issues of the immigration debate can be framed. The Warm Database designed for Turbulence serves three purposes: as an annotated guide for the uninitiated to and through the mountains of documents that surround detention, deportation and immigrants' rights; as a resource for and call to action; and as the starting point of a data collection project designed to span multiple communities and languages. In this web-based phase of the project it takes the form of a warm data questionnaire that anyone who has been affected by detention and deportation is invited to fill out (a solidarity version is also provided). The warm data questionnaire is designed to be voluntary, anonymous, and public: diametrically opposed to the questions asked during government processes like special registration, and to elicit data that will be the opposite of the cold, hard facts held in classified files. Some of the questions we asked ourselves while designing the database were: What describes you but could never be held against you in a court of law? What would be the right questions to ask to know you without knowing your name?

In 2005, we translated the documents and data systems of the web project offline and brought them together into the physical library Index of the Disappeared, together with a series of prints, portraits and postcards we had been producing; a collection of case histories, reports, laws and legal briefs, media coverage, and ephemera from post-9/11 activism; and books that connect issues in immigrant rights to the broader currents of secrecy and surveillance, civil liberties, human rights, the prison industry, the war on terror, economics and globalization, and the art of resistance. The library has cold and warm sides, each with space for reading and writing.

The latest versions of the library de-materialize its literal form by using images, documents and text fragments from the Disappeared archives to surround and confront the viewer with unexpected transformations of both familiar and unfamiliar information.

For the first installation of the library, at LMCC's Cities, Art & Recovery conference on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, we produced the first issue of a 'zine also called Index of the Disappeared. Like the library, the 'zine features contributions from other artists who have been working around the issues of detention, deportation, disappearance and immigrants' rights, including Jenny Polak & Dread Scott, the Visible Collective, Raj Kahlon and Joan Linder. We welcome contributions to the library, website, and future issues of the 'zine: contact us at archive[nospam]@kabul-reconstructions.net with ideas, links, or suggestions.

See documentation of more recent versions of the Index.

Points of Proof was originally commissioned by the new Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan -- one of the largest and most concentrated Arab American communities in the United States -- for their inaugural exhibition. I flew to Detroit to shoot Points of Proof in March 2005, as the REAL ID Act was being debated in Congress, the media, and the many other arenas of the immigrant rights struggle. The Act, which strips illegal and temporarily legal immigrants of the right to a U.S. driver’s license and sets new, near-impossible standards of proof and credibility for asylum claims, was passed just before the exhibition opened in May. Points of Proof thus reflects the situation in which increasingly large numbers of American immigrants find themselves by asking viewers and interviewees to reduce their American identities to a single point of proof – points being the system used by a number of state DMV bureaus to rate different documents for their effectiveness as proof of identity.

To make the video Points of Proof, I invited 30 new and longtime Americans in the Detroit area to answer the question: If someone questioned your right to call yourself an American, what is the one story, object, image or document you would offer as your proof? Their surprisingly complicated and difficult answers are interwoven into a series of conversations that throw into relief the subjective and volitional nature of identity, the difficulty of pinning the constantly shifting idea of America within strictly national borders, and the question of proof as defined more by belief than by the material evidence at hand. In the video, the question of proof quickly raises other questions -- Is geography destiny? Does culture extend beyond citizenship? Is proof finally a question of faith and belief or does it depend on the material evidence at hand? -- whose answers are equally contested and complex.

During the six-month run of the inaugural exhibition at the Arab American National Museum, In/Visible, Points of Proof was shown as a single-channel video on a monitor with a grid of postcards featuring the same question asked in the video hanging on the wall beside it. Visitors to the exhibition at the AANM, and subsequent shows in LA and New York, were provided with pencils and invited to add their answers to the collection of and debate on proof. Given free (anonymous and unmoderated) rein, these postcard respondents range from bitter to idealistic to hilarious. Thanks to a 2006 Longwood Digital Matrix commission, a web-based version of Points of Proof, which will include captioned Polaroids of people interviewed for the video as well as scans of all the (125+) postcards completed to date, will launch in December 2006. The project can also be re-staged in other cities and communities: a new edition is planned for Buffalo in 2007-08.

The many different answers to the question posed by Points of Proof register the many variations in our contemporary definitions of what it means to be American, and how, when and where we locate the roots of our American lives – at a time when remembering those differences, and this country's foundation on their hybrid strength, is crucial to the decisions we are presently making about how difference will be treated in our future.

Read the text about Points of Proof and warm data collection.

Security Blanket is an ongoing project in two parts:
recording sessions and listening systems.

The recording sessions are staged in installations that recreate the familiar security of a childhood bedroom. Participants visit the room one at a time and are invited to lie down on a small white bed made up with flowered linens, read the questions in a book waiting on the pillow, and whisper their answers to a tiny hole in a false wall panel cloaked by the pattern of the room's antique floral wallpaper.

The book contains a series of questions about the different meanings and associations that we assign to the word "security," and as visitors progress through the questions, the act of whispering in a private, "safe" room leads their answers closer to the intimacy of confession than the self-consciousness of interview. These confessions are, however, being recorded by a microphone directly behind the false wall, cabled to a concealed, voice-activated digital recorder.

The security secrets collected during recording sessions are then presented through listening systems. These installations are freestanding false walls inserted into a space, or tunnels existing onsite, which are padded with quilting foam and soft cream fabric, so that a visitor leaning against a wall is met by a comforting embrace reminiscent of a favorite blanket. The wall is also pierced with small holes around which its full softness is pulled into concavity, as if by a tiny vortex. From a few feet away, the wall seems to be indistinctly whispering. When visitors lean into the wall and put their ears right up to the holes, they can hear individual security confessions, almost as if secrets were being whispered directly into their ears. You can listen to a short excerpt of a mix of security secrets by clicking here (1.4 MB mp4 sound file).

In the two versions of the project presented to date (for the 2005 d.u.m.b.o. festival and Smack Mellon's open studios) the recording and listening sections of Security Blanket have been staged separately. For future iterations we would like to explore the possibility of configuring an installation where recording and listening are happening simultaneously, either in the same space separated by a literal wall, or in two different spaces linked by radio transmission.