War, exile and erasure: Malina Suliman's art gives voice to Afghan women living in silence

First, you smell it. Then you see it. The encounter with Afghan artist Malina Suliman's work at Riga's annual contemporary art exhibition, Survival Kit 16, is first and foremost olfactory — therefore primal. It enters the body before it enters the intellect.

Malina, who began her practice with street murals and clandestine painting, now constructs environments that behave like living organisms: smelling, staining, ageing, and transforming.

Her installation, Afghan Women's Wishes, is composed of large yellow and orange sheets of fabric, heavily scented and saturated with turmeric and cumin, suspended from the ceiling like a floating architecture. The work resembles a washing line, sails, or skin hung out to dry.

Yet Malina resists the metaphor of lightness or flight. For her, the work represents weight, residue, and consequence.

Speaking exclusively to The New Arab, she explains that the spices are not decorative, nor merely sensory, but geopolitical: "I used it as spices in the fabric… symbolising the colonisation, but also symbolising the invasion of Afghanistan."

Afghanistan, she reminds The New Arab, has been invaded three times: first by the British, then by the Russians, and later by the United States. These repeated incursions are not abstractions for her, but scars written into everyday life.

"The direct effect, and the most harmful effect, is left in a woman's life," she states, framing the work not as representation, but as consequence.

Voices, not wishes

Despite the title, Malina explains it is not about 'wishes' in a romantic sense. She almost corrects herself when speaking about it: "It's not about wishes at all… It’s about their voices."

She shares that when she was invited to produce a work for Riga, she struggled to find an honest title, and that the word 'wishes' came only later and imperfectly, as the textile carries not fantasies but testimonies.

Through her sisters and friends still living in Afghanistan, Malina asked women and girls to share what they could not publicly say.

"I asked… Afghan girls or women about their voices, which are not heard," she explains, adding that these voices were written in Persian (Dari), her own language, and then carefully calligraphed onto cloth.

According to Malina, the process of producing the work was slow and viscous. She marinated the fabric in spices, dried it, sprayed it again, and dried it again, building thick, sedimented layers of material, with the work never meant to be inert. In fact, what transformed the piece was mould, something she had only partially anticipated, as biological life began to grow inside the spice-soaked fibres.

Instead of treating this as damage, Malina allowed it to continue, letting living organisms collaborate with her.

"This work changed… it started to grow mould, and these voices, which were no longer heard, became alive," she says, with what appears as decay becoming animation and what seems like rot becoming voice.

The setting of Survival Kit sharpened these meanings. Curated by Slavs and Tatars around the mythical figure of the Simurgh, the exhibition addressed ideas of migration, transformation, and collective survival. Many viewers read the hanging cloth as wings. Malina, however, is precise in her refusal of easy symbolism.

"For me, it was directly about this fabric becoming a sculpture," she explains, adding that the work is not meant to lift the viewer, but to weigh down, to hang like history itself, carrying not only the words of others but also her own separation.

"It was not only their voices… I'm also one of them, but I'm away from them," she says, naming the split that exile has carved into her body.

From street art to body and ritual

While discussing her current work, Malina reflects on the roots of her artistic journey.

Born in 1990, Malina first made headlines in Kandahar with illegal street works that defied increasingly restrictive cultural codes, forging an early practice shaped by danger.

For Malina, painting in public served a dual purpose: exposure and protection. The wall became both shield and battleground, and her first skeleton-burqa images and public interventions functioned as much as survival strategies as political gestures.

Though the mediums she employs have changed dramatically, Malina insists that the central energy of her work has remained consistent.

"My main focus is the conflict behind identity," she says, noting that over time, this conflict has expanded to encompass gender, race, migration, and structural exclusion.

She continues, "Race, gender, inequality… and always coming back to marginalised people, including immigrants."

Now living in the Netherlands, Malina measures the passage of time not in years, but in estrangement: "It's been 12 years living here in exile."

Her formal education further intensified this shift. After arriving in the Netherlands in 2013, she completed her first Master's degree in 2015, followed by a second Master's in choreography and dance in 2025.

This training redirected her focus from surface to body: the wall was no longer enough — she needed to bring the skin into her work. Borders became something experienced in muscle rather than merely drawn on maps. Gradually, her practice expanded toward performance, sound, and ritual.

This migration of medium culminates in her project The Weight of Silence, which draws directly from her own 2017 asylum and immigration interviews. Originally designed as instruments of verification, these documents are transformed into instruments of exposure.

Malina explains her method simply: "I take out my answer. The questions were there… to show how many questions they are going to face."

The violence in the work, she notes, lies in its asymmetry: an uninterrupted machine of institutional speech confronting a body that is not allowed to speak.

Adding to this, she explains that the project unfolds in multiple phases: as poetry, as text, as opera, as a sound piece, and as live performance.

In Sweden, for instance, she collaborated with opera singers, a composer, and pianists to transform bureaucratic interrogation into a sung lament. Later, she created a sound performance accompanied by a traditional rope-dart weapon, with movements that were not theatrical but physiological.

"All emotions stay in my body, and I wanted to express them through this rope dart," she explains, adding that for her, the rope ultimately becomes an extension of the nervous system, looping and striking through the air to draw the invisible trauma of the asylum process into physical space.

In discussing this, she emphasises that collectivity has also become central to her recent practice. For example, in her Ritual for the Silenced: A Performative Protest for Human Rights, enacted in Stockholm and later in Sofia, participants were invited to temporarily relinquish their individual identities by covering their bodies with long black veils.

"No one knows who is behind this fabric; there is no gender or race," Malina explains, adding that the gesture is not about erasure for its own sake, but about empathy.

"It's about knowing how to feel, and experience marginalised people, and how to empower them," she says.

Recalling the performance, Malina notes that it incorporated prayer, speeches, and traditional songs — some specific to women's experiences, such as Bulgarian folk songs about forced marriage — as participants moved in a circle to drum rhythms, holding one another in a temporary community of blindness and touch before discarding the veil at the end.

"We throw away fabric as a gesture of not wanting," she says, with the body re-emerging altered by having inhabited invisibility.

Return to Afghanistan

Upon reflection, Malina shares that in 2025, after more than a decade away, she returned to Afghanistan for the first time.

"It was extremely emotional for me to go back," she recalls, encountering a country that was not the one she had left, where the weight of control had only deepened.

She describes how women are now excluded even from basic leisure: "They are not even able to go to school… or to picnic places with their families."

She also witnessed how new Taliban regulations prohibit women from accessing parks, mountains, restaurants, and public spaces, even when accompanied by male relatives. Fear, she says, is no longer episodic; it is structural and sedimented in the heart, and notes that her return intensified, rather than healed, her sense of belonging.

"I didn't feel fully Dutch… and I didn't feel 100 percent Afghan either," she admits.

For her, exile is not simply a geographical state, but a permanent bodily condition, leaving her existing in between and unable to fully occupy either side.

Looking ahead

From this fracture, new projects are emerging for Malina, who is currently developing a plan to work with Afghan women through embroidery, one of the few practices still permitted under Taliban rule.

"Embroidery is the only thing the Taliban allow women to do… and I want to work with them," she explains.

Her aim is not only to help them economically but also to construct a shared cartography of memory — a fabric map stitched from testimonies — where embroidery is not just a craft, but a form of survival, with thread as a lifeline and the needle as a quiet protest.

With this in mind, Afghan Women's Wishes emerges not as a poetic metaphor, but as a living archive: an Afghan textile transformed into an installation, dyed with spices that carry the history of invasion, inscribed with voices that are not supposed to exist, and shaped by mould that acts as a collaborator.

Hung in a Latvian exhibition space, written in Dari, and evolving over time, it becomes a geography of displacement in its own right.

Viewers walk beneath it, breathe in its scent, and unknowingly inhale histories of war, control, longing, and endurance.

To stand beneath it is not to 'understand' Afghanistan, but to feel how history enters the lungs. The question of what it means to speak when speech is forbidden resonates in her erased transcripts; the question of what it means to be visible when the body is erased pulses through veiled collectives; and the question of how to remember when memory is suppressed settles into the spice-stained cloth.

Malina's work insists that resistance does not always announce itself with volume. Sometimes it stains. Sometimes it grows. Sometimes it smells. Sometimes it moulds. It accumulates slowly, patiently, and unresolved, living within fabric and breath, until silence itself becomes impossible to maintain.

Naima Morelli is an arts and culture writer with a particular interest in contemporary art from the Middle East, North Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. She is also the author of Arte Contemporanea in Indonesia, un'introduzione and The Singapore Series: a contemporary art reportage

Follow her on X: @naimamorelli