By Paul Gessell
A prominent Afghan artist celebrated in several countries for her dramatic photos illustrating the silencing of women is being denied the opportunity to speak in Ottawa by the Canadian government.
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| Hanifa-Alizada |
Hanifa Alizada, a photo-artist and art teacher at Kabul University, has been refused a visa to enter Canada to deliver a speech about life for Afghan women and to exhibit her work at a symposium Jan. 22-25 called The Shrinking World of Photography.
The symposium is being organized by the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), in partnership with the Nobel Women’s Initiative and MATCH International Women’s Fund, and is designed to explore the way photographers from around the world handle such issues as violence against women.
Some of Alizada’s photographs, a body of work called Discrimination, were to be part of the planned symposium exhibitions at SPAO and SAW Gallery.
In recent years, Alizada and her art have travelled widely to the United States, Europe and Asia. She is to visit Denmark in early January for an exhibition and artist’s talk, and India in March.
Alizada also participated in a globe-trotting exhibition sponsored by the World Bank this year on the subject of violence against women. Some of those photos show women in traditional Muslim clothes with hands covering their mouths and eyes. Others show body parts tightly bound in ropes.
Symposium organizers are shocked at Alizada’s inability to get a visa.
“My reaction is surprise and extreme disappointment because Hanifa had travelled relatively freely in the past and participated in international exhibitions,” says Tony Martins, director of development for SPAO. “Hanifa’s desire to come to Canada to exhibit her work was a key factor in the development of the entire symposium.”
Alizada and Gholam Reza Sepehri, her fiancé and artistic collaborator, both applied for visas this fall through the Canadian High Commission in Islamabad, Pakistan. The Canadian embassy in Afghanistan does not issue visas to Afghan nationals and sends all applicants to Islamabad.
The high commission denied the applications in what appear to be form letters that spell out four reasons for the rejection of the applications by Alizada and Sepehri.
“In reaching a decision, an officer considers several factors; these may include the applicant’s travel and identity documents, reasons for travel to Canada, contacts in Canada, financial means for the trip, ties to country of residence (including immigration status, employment and family ties) and whether the applicant would be likely to leave Canada at the end of his/her authorized stay,” says the letter, a copy of which was sent by Alizada to the Citizen.
The letter is dated Nov. 11 and is signed with an illegible signature of a Citizenship and Immigration officer at the high commission. No legible name for the officer appears on the letter.
Alizada says she was never interviewed by the high commission and is perplexed as to why her application was rejected. She says she has no interest in living in Canada, where she has no relatives. Her family and her job are in Afghanistan.
The purpose of the trip to Canada is “artist talks, art residencies and art exhibitions,” Alizada wrote in an email to the Citizen. “How can one expect me to have a different purpose?”
She then notes that she has travelled to several countries in recent years with no problems.
“I did travel to U.S.A., Europe and south Asian countries. I never overstayed and never got refused by any embassy. What can be the problem with my travel history?”
The high commission in Pakistan referred queries about Alizada to Citizenship and Immigration headquarters in Ottawa. There, the department said privacy laws prevent it from discussing individual cases.
Maureen Korp is an Ottawa-based curator and academic who has taught art at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. In 2008, during a two-year stint at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan, Korp taught Alizada. Korp spoke of Alizada in a lecture she presented Oct. 31 at a conference organized in New York by that city’s School of Visual Arts.
“Today, she is the first-ever artist to have her work sent on tour by the World Bank,” Korp said then. The exhibition, curated by Marina Galvani, is entitled One in Three —violence against women, worldwide. Earlier this summer, the exhibition opened in Washington, accompanied by two theatre plays and two panel discussions.
According to the curator, “Hanifa’s works were the poetic and inspirational core of the exhibition.” Hanifa Alizada’s fearful photograph entitled A Monument is the cover of the catalogue. It depicts, the artist writes, “a woman’s suffering when her life is summarized in how a man wants her to live it.”
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