Aziz Hazara | Bow Echo

The installation Bow Echo (2019) consists of five large screens showing five boys climbing a high rock, braving fierce winds. Once at the summit, they almost ceremoniously play a kazoo – a simple folk wind instrument with a nasal tone. The stark contrast between the harsh weather on the plateau near Kabul and the piercing sound of the kazoo becomes a poetic metaphor for the brutal realities of war in Afghanistan. Hazara lays bare structures of power, while revealing how a traumatized population struggles to cope with conflict and oppression. In this context, the kazoo’s tones become both an eerie, rarefied soundtrack drifting over occupied territory, and a powerful call for individual expression, hope, and life.

Aziz Hazara (b. 1992, Wardak, Afghanistan) lives and works in Kabul and Berlin. With his oeuvre – which combines photography, video, sound, programming languages, text and multimedia installations – he explores themes such as identity, memory, archives, conflict, occupation and migration, invariably from a broader geopolitical and power-critical perspective.