London’s Bankside art complex and Kabul could not be farther apart in cultural terms. The Taleban banned all depictions of the human form during its rule, destroyed ancient works of art and blew up music shops.

But a former curator at Tate Modern yesterday took a step across the cultural chasm with the first contemporary art exhibition in Afghanistan.

The show opened as a surreal oasis of calm and culture in a tense and jittery city. Bodyguards followed many of the diplomats who came to view the works by leading Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian artists.

A car-bomb alert during the event prompted some to leave early. Two months ago a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the historic Babur Gardens where the show was held.

Even getting the 51 works into the country for the exhibition was a challenge for the show’s English director, Jemima Montagu. Works of art featuring text from the Koran could not be imported for fear that sniffer dogs might touch them during security checks at airports. Dogs are considered unclean by many Muslims.

Two paintings remain in transit. “I knew it was ridiculously ambitious to hope everything would arrive on time. If 75 per cent made it then I knew I could count myself lucky,” Ms Montagu, 34, said.

She was a curator for Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool before moving to Afghanistan to work for the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a charity that supports Afghan arts.

All the artists featured are part of the burgeoning regional art scene. Some Pakistani and Iranian artists are commanding tens of thousands of pounds for their works in London and New York.

“The art scene in Pakistan is a very heavily politicised movement,” said Aisha Khalid, 36. Her work features burka-clad figures and gaping red bullet holes and draws on an ancient tradition of miniature art in Pakistan.

For the Kabul Living Traditions show, only works thought to be within the tolerance of Afghanistan’s conservative populace were displayed.

Three thousand Afghan school-children are expected to visit the exhibition in the next two months as a result of sponsorship by donors, including the British Government and Afghanistan’s biggest tea importer. The exhibition will then move to Islamabad and Tehran.

Beside the established names, several lesser-known Afghan artists were exhibited. Ali Baba Aurang, 37, is a painter who specialises in calligraphy. “I was very interested in painting and calligraphy but during the Taleban time I could not produce any work with a living being, so the only venue of expression for me was calligraphy,” he said.

“Afghanistan has been recently reborn to the political world and is now reviving in other aspects. Art and culture are the main means of communication between humans, the mild way to communicate, and so I think they are the most important.”

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