Kubra Khademi: Art of strength and survival
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On a busy street in Kabul, a young artist steps into traffic wearing a steel sculpture she has shaped around her breasts and buttocks. She calls the piece Armour. Within minutes, a crowd gathers. Days later, death threats force her to flee the country. Today, Afghan artist Kubra Khademi lives in exile in France, creating bold multidisciplinary works that confront patriarchy while reclaiming the female body as a site of power, sexuality and resistance. Drawing on personal history and the cultures she grew up in across Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, her art blends performance, painting and symbolism to challenge deeply rooted taboos around women’s bodies.
For her latest series, Origin of the Universe, Khademi paints surreal scenes of women giving birth to animals — images inspired by a story her grandmother once told her about strength and survival. Following her creative process, Sahar Zand joins Khademi in her studio as she paints one of the works, revealing how memory, exile and defiance are transformed into art.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It was literally a battlefields. |
| 0:02.6 | It was literally a battlefield. |
| 0:10.8 | I alone surrounded by thousands and thousands of men. |
| 0:15.4 | Following me, they were following me. |
| 0:18.4 | It was like a lot of moments in my own life and a lot of moments within other women in Afghanistan. |
| 0:25.4 | You're listening to In the studio from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:29.0 | I'm Sahar Zand, speaking to Afghan artist Cobra Khademi. |
| 0:33.5 | I did it on my own body, like my breast, my but it looks like since it is metal, it looks like I've exaggerated. |
| 0:41.0 | But it was not exaggerated when I was making it. |
| 0:44.1 | Cobra is describing a still costume she made, a sculpted suit exaggerating her breasts and buttocks. |
| 0:51.7 | She called the piece armor. |
| 0:53.5 | Because it is armor, literally an armor that |
| 0:56.0 | I'm wearing and walking. It represents every day of a woman in that country and society. |
| 1:02.7 | What is that every day? It's a battle. And as if preparing for battle on a gray spring day in |
| 1:09.2 | 2015, which just so happened to be her 26th birthday, |
| 1:13.7 | Cobra put on under armour and stepped onto Kota Sanghi, a busy road in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. |
| 1:20.6 | For me, it was like the perfect place. The audience were there. They didn't invite me. I didn't invite them. |
| 1:26.4 | I was there. They were there. That was the |
| 1:28.4 | truest place. Why was this the truest place? Because I was harassed the most. The culture of street |
| 1:34.1 | harassment is by word, by gaze, touching. And every woman, every girl has the experience of being |
| 1:40.0 | touched, grabbed there. You see, that it's so crowded, occupied by men. |
| 1:50.3 | It was a public performance confronting the daily harassment Afghan women face on the streets. |
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