© Jared Moossy. A young Afghan girl up on one of the major hills over looking the Kabul at night.

The exhibition Women Between Peace and War: Afghanistan is a multimedia reflection of the lives of women and girls in Afghanistan as seen through the perspectives of rule of law, economics, health, and education. The reality for women in most communities in Afghanistan is hard, as indicated by these statistics: a woman’s chance of dying while giving birth is 1 in 8; the average life expectancy for a woman is 44 years; the approximate literacy rate for women stands at 12.7 percent; 70 to 80 percent of women are forced into marriages; 57 percent of girls are married before the legal age of  sixteen. This project, art directed by Giorgio Baravalle of de.MO and curated by Leslie Thomas of ART WORKS Projects, includes work by renowned photographers Lynsey Addario, Moises Saman, Stephanie Sinclair, Abbie Traylor-Smith, Veronique de Viguerie and Farzana Wahidy, and essays by journalist Elizabeth Rubin.

The exhibition will tour internationally in both digital and poster formats with an accompanying magazine that has removable pages, so that each image can be displayed. This flexible design will allow both formal installations in major cultural venues as well as community exhibitions to be easily produced for international sites. Previews and special screenings have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Conferencias do Estoril in Portugal, and at the US Department of State.

© Jean Chung.

© Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. Momina, a midwife student prepares a needle with a pain killer to help a pregnant woman in labor in the delivery room at the Bamiyan Provincial hospital September 4, 2009 in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

© Ron Haviv / VII. Burqas dry outside on a street in Kabul.

Tags: Abbie Traylor-Smith, ART WORKS, de.MO, eronique de Viguerie, Farzana Wahidy, Giorgio Baravalle, Jared Moossy, Jean Chung, Leslie Thomas, Lynsey Addario, Moises Saman, Paula Bronstein, Ron Haviv, Stephanie Sinclair, Women Between Peace and War: Afghanistan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 12:00 pm ET by Amber Terranova and is filed under Documentary, Photo Galleries, Photojournalism.