On the edge of Canvas
Details
Artist name: Razia Akbari
Title: On the edge of Canvas
Year: 2025
Duration: 14 Minutes 23 Seconds
Medium: Single Channel Video with Stereo Sound
Credit: Razia Akbari, On the edge of Canvas, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Selected for AFI'26 by Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile e.V. (CCAA in eXiLe)
On the edge of Canvas (2025)
Razia Akbari Selected by Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile e.V. (CCAA in eXiLe)
When one tries to create a barrier between the past, present, and future, the distances are unconsciously removed, as if no distance had been crossed between them. This film is a movement between layers, an exploration in layers of lost patterns, mute names, invisible bodies, faces in the haze, and poems neither spoken nor heard. An attempt to search for what remains unwritten among the forgotten layers of history, a search deep into the seams, where colours, lines and forms silently scream, where the gaze becomes a visual intuition.
Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile e.V. (CCAA in eXiLe) say:
Along “On the edge of Canvas” a woman’s body moves within the confines of stratified stone walls, spaces that evoke silence, isolation, and a concealed past. Her movement slips through layers of history, experiencing the memory of this place like a silent witness. Although her body appears small and vulnerable against these structures, her presence renders this history newly visible and tangible. Her movement continues toward the refined stone stairways of a building that has repeatedly shifted its function over time: from a site of chemical production for war, to a military base, and eventually to a university and library. Its transformations narrate the persistence of power, power that changes form but does not disappear, power that survives by reshaping itself.
Through her body, the woman draws the viewer into reading these layered narratives, urging us to consider what becomes visible and what remains hidden. The woman’s body is simultaneously victim and narrator; it is both seen and seeing. The stone walls and the woman’s body, in their tension, arrive at a shared language.
In the final moments of the film, the woman’s disappearance and the building’s continued presence before the lens reveal the culmination of this tension and its concealed dialogue: the erasure of the living body and the fixation of the stone archive. It is as if the moving narrative falls silent, and the stone wall, now the dominant memory, takes its place. What was once embodied and concrete becomes internal and abstract. This absence becomes the very sign of the narrative’s endurance.
Razia Akbari has engaged with stone in her previous video works as well. In the “Lost Bird”, stone appears as a symbol of violence; in “Hopscotch”, she references a childhood game she once played. In Afghanistan, this game is common among young girls. In it, a girl’s mastery over her body and mind mirrors her mastery over the stone and its trajectory. She must learn this control through practice. The stone repeatedly strikes her foot until she acquires the skill to direct her movements precisely, ensuring the stone lands where it should. As Akbari notes, this game is endless.
Razia Akbari is an emerging young artist working in the field of contemporary art and is currently continuing her studies at HfG Offenbach.
CCAA in eXiLe, Head and Curator, Rahraw Omarzad
Details
Artist name: Razia Akbari
Title: On the edge of Canvas
Year: 2025
Duration: 14 Minutes 23 Seconds
Medium: Single Channel Video with Stereo Sound
Credit: Razia Akbari, On the edge of Canvas, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Selected for AFI'26 by Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile e.V. (CCAA in eXiLe)