In "Rehearsal" (2020), the artist’s young subjects play a different game. A boy recreates the sound of gunfire as he sits on the shoulders of another who swings him side to side like a weapon mount. Hazara says many children in Afghanistan have mastered the mimicry of such noises, even recognising the differences between the Taliban-used Kalashnikovs and the US military’s M16 rifles. “War has become very normalised,” he says. “We grow up with it, we die with it. We commemorate it, we celebrate it and we remember it.” As the video’s title suggests, Rehearsal shows the children mirroring what they see around them, performing what is expected of them, especially as young boys, and practising for what may be ahead. What begins as children’s games may become more sinister later on, and in the context of a war-stricken country, the outcome feels more fated.

Aziz Hazara (b. 1992 Wardak, Afghanistan) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. He works across mediums such as photography, video, sound, programming languages, text and multimedia installation exploring questions of identity, memory, archive, conflict, and migration in the context of power relations, geopolitics, and the panopticon. Hazara’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as Yerevan Modern Art Museum (Yerevan, Armenia), KHOJ International Artists Association (New Delhi, India), and Asia Culture Center (ACC) (Kwangju, South Korea). Hazara was artist in residence at KHOJ International Artists Association (New Delhi, India) and UMISAA (United Nation Madenjeet Institute for South Asian Arts). Hazara studied Fine Arts at Beaconhouse National University (Lahore, Pakistan).