MEET THE PEACEMAKERS

HEROES WITH PAINTBRUSHES

Omaid Sharifi, artist, Afghanistan

After 39 years of war in his home country, it perplexed artist Omaid Sharifi that all those held up as heroes in Afghanistan were men with guns. He had a different idea about who should be celebrated.

Along with fellow artists, Sharifi co-founded the Artlords collective to start projecting a nonviolent, hopeful message for their battle-scarred country. The Everyday Heroes project was one of their first pieces of street art, depicting Kabul’s municipal workers ‘who get up at 5am to sweep the streets of our city’ and then the ‘good nurses, good teachers, good independent journalists – people who are peaceful, hardworking, and not corrupt’.

The Artlords use the ‘blast’ walls that criss-cross Kabul as their canvas. Designed to protect the powerful from the suicide attacks that plague the city, the barriers truncate its streets and symbolize an ever-deteriorating security situation and lack of protection for ordinary civilians. The artists’ collective has imbued the blast walls with new meaning, decorating them with doves to welcome a Peace march into the city last June. A recent mural lionizes Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun activist nicknamed the Muslim Gandhi; another depicts Fatemah Qaderyan, the captain of an all-girls robotics engineering team, while other murals condemn abuse against women.

The Artlords say they want to ‘visualize communities’ desire to move from war to peace’ while uplifting and uniting Afghans. Artlords’ volunteers involve citizens directly in making art, with a paint-by-numbers method that encourages passers-by to participate. ‘Many were