Hashem Shakeri

“If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Hashem Shakeri spent months documenting daily life in Afghanistan following the regime change, capturing its adjustment to the Taliban’s return. His work portrays this transformation through an absurd yet poetic lens, set in an uncertain, fluid atmosphere.

With remarkable commitment and personal risk, the artist traveled independently across Afghanistan for months to create a body of work that refuses the clichés of documentary photography and photojournalism. Instead, he offers an intimate, poetic, and visually arresting portrait of the communities most affected by the Taliban’s return—women, ethnic and religious minorities, and other vulnerable individuals.

By drawing on a rich range of photographic languages and emotional registers, his images move fluidly between the surreal and the symbolic, the tender and the haunting. What emerges is not just a record of oppression, but a revealing, deeply human testament to resilience, resistance, and the enduring pulse of life beneath the weight of a silenced nation.