Kaveh Ayreek - The Empty Suitcase
Kaveh Ayreek is a performance artist, photographer, screenwriter, theater, and film director living in Norway, who was born as an Afghan refugee in Iran.
After the fall of Kabul in 2021 by the extremist Taliban group, he was forced to leave Afghanistan for the second time. In most of his works, he tries to share his experiences as a member of the Hazara minority in Afghanistan and as an artist in exile. His works are mostly about women, children and the role and status of ethnic, linguistic and gender minorities in Afghanistan.
He is exploring to redefine his identity as an immigrant in his new world while reflecting the experience and history of his nation in his art.
His play The Empty Suitcase was translated and published in French in 2022, and next year it is going to be translated into three languages, English, Norwegian and Dutch.
ABOUT THE EMPTY SUITCASE
What happens when suddenly the homeland that produced and nourished every single cell making up a person’s body has slipped away?
It was around 2010 when Maryam and Hamid, a young Afghan couple whose parents had migrated to Iran at the beginning of what was to be a series of wars in their country, decided to go to Afghanistan, to the country they had seen in their imagination and dreams but had never known, having never set foot there. The Empty Suitcase is the story of returning from exile.
