Angela Ghayour

Andrea G. Artz's portrait of Angela Ghayour, the Afghan educator who founded the Herat Online School to provide remote schooling to girls and women in Afghanistan after the 2021 ban on female secondary and higher education. The print follows the working method of Artz's portrait series: a digital photograph is colour-separated, a key block carved for the principal contours, and further blocks cut for each tonal layer before being printed by hand onto [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), water-based pigments, and nori paste. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations carry transitions of skin tone and ground that would otherwise read as photographic continuity. The translation slows the image — a face initially circulated through digital media — into a sequence of registered, hand-pulled impressions. Within Artz's wider practice, which moves between photography, collage, folded paper sculpture, and installation, the portrait belongs to a strand engaged with sitters whose public presence is mediated through documentary photography and online circulation, and which the woodblock returns to a tactile, single-sheet register.