La fille et le dragon - Lecture dessinée / Latitudes Contemporaines

Kubra Khademi et Nicole Lapierre

Debates
Live performance

Le Grand Sud, Lille
Pass Latitudes
Latitudes Prod.

Lecture and drawing – La Fille et le Dragon

In 2024, Kubra Khademi, a Hazara feminist artist from Afghanistan, published her first graphic novel, La fille et le dragon [The girl and the dragon]. She gave the text to Nicole Lapierre, a French anthropologist and sociologist. For Latitudes Contemporaines, the two writers are offering a live ‘drawn’ lecture of the book.

One day during the winter of 1989, in a poor refugee family which had left Afghanistan to escape the Soviet Army, the mujaheddins and the persecutions which the Afghan Sunnis systematically inflicted upon the Shia Hazara, a little girl was born, with her hands completely open, considered a good luck sign for the household. She was the sixth child alongside ten other children. The mullah refused to choose a first name for her, to record her birth in the family Koran. Why should he, for a mere girl? In the end she was given the name Kubra, meaning “big.” The child showed talent in drawing, a gift which for her became like a kind of armor, protecting and strengthening her against the hardships she would experience living under the double, iron rule of religious fanaticism and the patriarchy. With her weapons, pencils, brushes and a fierce determination, Kubra began an incredible journey as an artist, with a sacred mission: killing the dragon! A unique graphic and literary depiction of the invincibility of art, an homage to women, to life, to freedom.

Accessibility infos :

Reading in French without surtitles

In partnership with L’Affranchie bookstore
With the support of Lieux Culturels Pluridisciplinaires de la Ville de Lille

Biography(s)

KUBRA KHADEMI
Kubra Khademi is a Hazara artist, performer and feminist born in 1989 in Afghanistan. Through her practice, Kubra Khademi explores her life as a refugee and a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University before attending Beaconhouse University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore, she began creating public performances, a practice she continued upon her return to Kabul, where her work was a response to a male-dominated society with extreme patriarchal politics. After the execution of her performance known as Armor in 2015, she was forced to flee her home country. She was a refugee in France until she obtained French citizenship in 2020. Today, she lives and works in Paris. In 2016, she received an MFA Fellowship at the Pantheon and Audrey Azoulay, Minister of Culture, elevated her to the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Nominated for the Emerige Revelations in 2019 and a 2020 winner of the 1% art market, Kubra Khademi was in residence at the Fiminco Foundation, Paris, until 2021. In 2022, she was in long-term residency in New York with the Salomon Foundation, and designed the poster for the Avignon Festival during which she presented a solo exhibition at the Collection Lambert. At the same time, she presented a major solo exhibition at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern in Germany. In 2023, her new performance The Golden Horizon (افق طلائی) premiered at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris. Since 2016, Latitudes Prod. accompanies the development of her artistic and performative projects, and since 2020, her plastic work is represented by Galerie Eric Mouchet, in Paris. Her work has been presented in numerous venues, including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), TNG (Lyon), Museum Ludwig, Festival d’Avignon, Kunsthalle Thun, Void Contemporary Art Centre (Derry Londonderry), Pablo’s birthday (New York), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Bangkok Biennale, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), El Rastro (Madrid), Signal (Brussels), the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), the MuCEM (Marseille), the Fondation Fiminco (Romainville)… In 2024, she publishes with anthropologist Nicole Lapierre her first graphic novel, La fille et le dragon, at Éditions Denoël.

NICOLE LAPIERRE
Nicole LAPIERRE, socio-anthropologist, is Director of research Emeritus at CNRS and Co-editor of the journal Communications. Her main research topics are migrations, minorities and memory. Author of many books in Social Sciences, she also explores new forms of writing. Her book, Sauve qui peut la vie, won the Medicis Prize for non fiction in 2015. Since then, she published Faut-il se ressembler pour s’assembler? (Seuil, 2020),Le plus menteur d’entre nous (Seuil, 2023).