Dear Colleague,
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is pleased to invite you to the New York theatrical premiere of Infinite Incompleteness, an original one act performance piece created by the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), on Tuesday November 8, 2011 at 7.00pm at Helen Mills Theater, 137-139 West 26th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), New York, NY 10001. AHRDO is an all-Afghan led and run civil society organization based in Kabul working to promote human rights, accountability, and democracy through participatory theater and arts-based initiatives focusing on personal and collective narratives.
Infinite Incompleteness addresses themes emerging from more than three decades of war in Afghanistan (1978–present) and is based on real stories from victims around the country. The piece was developed based on the request from victims’ groups involved in participatory theater workshops that a theatrical work be created based on their own experiences. Stories were collected during workshops, with consent, for this purpose. The performance follows a woman, the Butimar-e Kabul, as she walks the streets of Kabul in search of her disappeared children. Interspersed with her storyline are the accounts of other male and female victims, relayed by three Afghan men who deliver the stories using the victims’ original words and language, speaking in Dari, Pashto and Hazaragi.
English surtitles will be provided. Panel discussion featuring Richard Bennett, Special Advisor to the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Hadi Marifat, Director of AHRDO, Patricia Gossman, ICTJ Afghanistan and Leeza Ahmady, Director, Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) at Asia Society and moderated by Elizabeth Rubin, Journalist, will follow the performance.
The event is free of charge. To reserve your place, please write to rsvp@themakeagency.com. For further information, please contact Nadia Siddiqui at +1 917 637 3829. In presenting these stories now, we hope to highlight victims’ and justice issues ahead of the Bonn 10 Conference on Afghanistan as well as to examine the uses of arts-based techniques in approaching questions of accountability in conflict and post-conflict settings. We hope you will join us for what promises to be a powerful and thought-provoking evening. Sincerely,
Patricia Gossman
Acting Head, Afghanistan ProgramICTJ
