Two young Afghan cousins, working under the pseudonyms Mahnaz Ebrahimi (b. 2000) and Somayeh Ebrahimi (b. 2001), have produced a striking series of black-and-white photographs that blend autobiography and invention to tell stories of repression, resilience and longing. They refuse to reveal their real names out of fear of Taliban retribution. The women and their families are Hazaras, Shia Muslims who fled Kabul after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 and now live in a remote mountain farming village where they had once worked as carpet weavers.
Shooting on cellphones with no formal photographic training, the cousins began making images around 2022. Madrid-based curator Edith Arance discovered their work on Instagram, communicated with them in Farsi, and helped bring the series to public view: first at her Galería Sura in Madrid in November 2024 and later at the Photoville festival in Brooklyn, where the work was shown through May 30. Arance translates the cousins’ captions and poems and describes the project as auto-fiction — a deliberate mix of personal memory and staged fantasy — with visual touches that echo magic realism.
The photographs are spare, often theatrical scenes in which burka‑clad figures, schoolgirls and silent performers inhabit bleak rural landscapes or dark interiors. Titles and short poems supplied by the cousins add layers of meaning and voice. In one image, titled “It will not stand in my way,” a bicyclist wrapped in a full burka sits at her handlebars; the meshed veil covers her eyes but the portrait conveys unbowed determination. Another shows a woman spinning so swiftly her billowing garment seems to lift her; Farsi graffiti on a wall reads, “I dreamed that my homeland was prosperous.”
Many of the images dramatize the tensions between confinement and freedom. “Life Is Today” captures a young girl dancing on a barren ridge beneath snow‑capped peaks, unveiled and playful; Arance notes the girl’s shadow resembles an airplane lifting away. “Liberation” shows a woman throwing her burka into the air — a symbolic shedding of darkness — accompanied by a poem about freeing oneself to the breeze and the sky. “Girl by the Door” uses light and shadow to show a student half hidden behind a chained wooden door, holding a tatty schoolbook; Mahnaz’s commentary links the image to the crackdown on girls’ education and the attacks that discouraged families from sending daughters to school in 2022.
Other works point to bans on music, dance and public expression. In “Vestiges of the Present,” a woman holds a boombox at her torso; the stance, and the caption, underline that music and singing are forbidden for women in public. A haunting tableau, “The Music of Poverty and Violence,” stages a burka‑draped figure shouldering an automatic rifle and bowing it like a violin, transforming an instrument of harm into a mock instrument of music. “When Will We Laugh From the Bottom of Our Hearts Again?” shows a young girl in sunglasses laughing, while “Autumn Games” captures three girls tossing leaves into the air — small, stubborn joys against a hard backdrop.
Themes of renewal and hope recur amid the darker images. “From the Depths of Darkness” depicts a woman holding earth and twigs from which a butterfly emerges; another titled “And the Glory of Growing Happens Within Us” shows a burka‑covered profile cradling a sprouting plant. These pictures, Arance says, argue that the Taliban’s version of destiny for Afghan women is not the only one: through ritual, imagination and quiet acts of defiance, the cousins insist on other possible futures.
The work’s power comes from its mixture of stark documentary detail and symbolic invention. Using trees, leaves, shadows, and small props, the cousins stage scenes that feel at once immediate and dreamlike. Their captions and short poems — translated and brought to international audiences by Arance — give the images a personal voice, making each photograph a small story of loss, resistance and aspiration.
These photographs are more than art objects; they are acts of bearing witness. Created under threat and shown through fragile channels like Instagram and modest gallery exhibitions, they register the everyday realities of Afghan women while imagining what might be possible if courage and imagination prevail.