The National Museum of Afghanistan is located across the street from the Darul Aman Palace in the Darulaman area of Kabul, Afghanistan. It was once considered to be one of the world's finest museums. There have been reports about expanding the museum or building a new larger one. Mohammad Zubair Abedi serves as the current director of the museum.
Buddhism, a religion founded by Gautama Buddha, first arrived in modern-day Afghanistan through the conquests of Ashoka, the third emperor of the Maurya Empire. Among the earliest notable sites of Buddhist influence in the country is a bilingual mountainside inscription in Greek and Aramaic that dates back to 260 BCE and was found on the rocky outcrop of Chil Zena near Kandahar.
The Prince Claus Fund was established in 1996, named in honor of Prince Claus of the Netherlands. The fund is subsidized annually by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Lida Abdul, is an Afghan-born video artist and performance artist. She was born as Lida Abdullah in Kabul in 1979 and fled the country as a child during the Soviet Invasion. She went on to live in India, Germany, and the United States.
Goshka Macuga is an artist based in London. She was one of the four nominees for the 2008 Turner Prize.
Babi Badalov is an Azerbaijani visual artist. Since 2011 he lives and works in Paris, France.
Naomi Beckwith is an American art historian who has been serving as the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum since 2021. Previously she had been the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Beckwith joined the curatorial staff there in May 2011.
Afghan art has spanned many centuries. In contrast to its independence and isolation in recent centuries, ancient and medieval Afghanistan spent long periods as part of large empires, which mostly also included parts of modern Pakistan and north India, as well as Iran. Afghan cities were often sometimes among the capitals or main cities of these, as with the Kushan Empire, and later the Mughal Empire. In addition some routes of the Silk Road to and from China pass through Afghanistan, bringing influences from both the east and west.
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, natives of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, are a visual arts couple working together as Kasmalieva & Djumaliev. The majority of their works are filmed and photographed social documentaries or multi-screen installation art. Based in Bishkek, they have exhibited their works since 1988 in venues around the world.
June Yap is a Singaporean curator, art critic, and writer. She is currently the Director of Curatorial & Collections at the Singapore Art Museum.
Shamsia Hassani is an Afghan street artist, a fine arts lecturer, and the associate professor of Drawing and Anatomy Drawing at the Kabul University. She has popularized "street art" in the streets of Kabul and has exhibited her art in several countries including India, Iran, Germany, United States of America, Switzerland, Vietnam, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Italy, Canada, and in diplomatic missions in Kabul. Hassani paints graffiti in Kabul to bring awareness to the war years. In 2014, Hassani was named one of FP's top 100 global thinkers. She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2021.
Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
Vandy Rattana is a photographer and artist, now resident in Taiwan, whose work is concerned with Cambodian society.
Layla Soudavar Diba is an Iranian-American independent scholar of art history and curator. She specializes in 18th/19th-century and contemporary Persian art and the Qajar period. She has curated various exhibitions, such as the Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1783-1925 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and co-curated Iran Modern (2013) alongside Fereshteh Daftari at New York City's Asia Society.
The art of Kazakhstan covers all forms of art created throughout history by the peoples living on the territory of modern-day Kazakhstan. Throughout most periods, much of the population of Kazakhstan was nomadic, or at least moved regularly across the vast country. The great majority of the art of Kazakhstan is applied art: the decoration of practical objects, including household utensils and patterned harnesses, through art forms such as carpet-weaving, pottery, and leatherwork. The art of Kazakhstan also includes architecture, fine arts, and sculpture.
The national pavilions host each participant nation's official representation during the Venice Biennale, an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy. Some countries own pavilion buildings in the Giardini della Biennale while others rent buildings throughout the city, but each country controls its own selection process and production costs.
Ajmal Ahmady is an Afghan-American economist and politician who formerly served as the Acting Governor of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, Da Afghanistan Bank, the Acting Minister of Commerce and Industry of Afghanistan, the Senior Economic Advisor to the President of Afghanistan, and represented Afghanistan on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline.
Rustam Khalfin was a Kazakh contemporary artist, painter and architect.
Vyacheslav Akhunov, is a Kyrgyz-born Uzbek visual artist, and author. He is known for performance art, video art, and painting. Akhunov lives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
