Meena Home

Australian-Afghani artist Meena Sediqi pays tribute to the undiscovered beauty of wartorn countries and her attachment to both the east and west in her ongoing Instagram collage project, Meena Home

- Salma Haidrani

Images coming out of war-torn countries in recent years tend to sit within the narratives of extreme violence, rebel groups and destruction. But when it comes to the Afghan Café, located in the politically unstable Helmand province of Afghanistan, the narrative shifts to ‘breaking boundaries’ or ‘stereotype breaking’.

It’s this type of thing that Sydney-based artist Meena Sediqi set out to challenge with Meena Home, a collection of contemporary pop art-fusing elements of Middle Eastern and central Asian cultures, encouraging viewers to re-examine their unconscious biases on war-torn countries. The fashion design and merchandising student acknowledges that she long viewed Afghanistan, her parents’ homeland, through an exclusively western lens.

“My young impressionable mind saw the media’s biased footage and I remember preparing myself for the worst,” she says. “Seeing colourful streets, tight-knit communities and beautiful buildings had never crossed my mind, yet that’s exactly what I’d experienced.”

She found her first visit jarring back in June 2010. “My negative expectations were completely different to the reality. It struck a chord in me...I wondered why I’d never heard of this positive side before.”

She credits this experience as the birthplace of Meena Home. She says: “Discovering the beauty in this country’s culture, art, history and architecture made me want to create a platform that counteracted the media’s solely negative portrayal of developing countries involved in ongoing war.” When the mainstream art world – and the mainstream media at that, has long relegated and ‘otherised’ the east as inferior, Meena’s ethos is particularly powerful.