Unfolding Projects

edited by Gali Weiss

While we are waiting

Unfolding Projects: While we are waiting documents an exchange between women writers in Afghanistan and women artists in Australia, in the form of a visual art project.

The project provides a platform for the expression of women’s rights, and for Afghan women’s voices and experiences to be heard and connected to outside their homeland, where they have been persecuted and silenced since 2021. Unfolding Projects: While we are waiting accompanies a generation of Afghan women who have learnt the values of education and expression throughout their lives but now find themselves as prisoners due to their gender. They are waiting for change.

Throughout 2022, months after the Taliban takeover, the Australian contingent of the Unfolding Projects art groupcollected stories and poems from Afghan women who had been restricted and eventually banned from their university studies. In 2023, the Australian women artists of the Unfolding Projects art groupresponded to the Afghan women’s writings, making artworks in the form of artist’s books (a work of art in book form). Twenty-one artist’s books were created by 2024.

This book Unfolding Projects: While we are waiting records the project’s artworks, the Afghan women’s writings in both Dari and English, and the Artist Statements by the Australian women. These artworks and texts connect people as they "listen to" and view this book, and develop an understanding of the situation of both Afghan women and their connections with Australian women. The importance of the project has been acknowledged by the acquisition of the artworks by several Australian public institutions, and private collections.

The sale of this publication Unfolding Projects: While we are waiting will raise money for supporting Afghan women to access the highest ambition most of them have: education.

Orders / enquiries: email unfoldingprojects.wwaw@gmail.com

Images of Artist’s Book artworks

(rollover to enlarge)

About the Editor

Gali Weiss is an artist, educationalist and researcher living and working in Melbourne. Since 2010, a major part of her practice has been managing Unfolding Projects, image-text exchanges between women artists in Australia and women in Afghanistan hoping for gender justice and peace.