It would not be a complete SOLI season if we didn't have a world premiere on one of our programs!! This year we will feature San Antonian Jack Stamps' Middle Eastern spiced work the sensuous terrain. Take a journey with us to far away ancient lands with an American touch without even leaving your seat through the sounds of Stamps, plus Edward J. Hines and Richard Danielpour.

"Afghanistan: The Long War"

A sobering on-the-ground assessment of Afghanistan's present state and future course, illustrated by images shot by the speaker in 2005 and 2010.

Terrible as the Taliban period was, many Afghans speak fondly of a secure time when justice was harsh and Islamic and neither the corrupt, NATO-backed regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai nor the chaos of the 1992-95 civil war prevailed.

Iason Athanasiadis is a Farsi-speaking journalist living in Afghanistan with daily access to a wide variety of Afghan and Western functionaries as well as ordinary people whose eye-opening stories of survival over the past thirty years of conflict he documents for Eurasia.net. He has interviewed former Taliban commanders and footsoldiers, spoken with prostitutes, martial athletes and drug addicts in an abandoned industrial complex in Kabul, photographed a night raid by the US military on a rural compound outside Kandahar and documented ballot corruption in Mazar-e Sharif during a stint as an electoral observer in last September's parliamentary poll.

Athanasiadis studied Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford and was a 2008 Nieman fellow at Harvard. He studied for a Masters at the Iranian Foreign Ministry's think-tank in Tehran and was imprisoned in Tehran's Evin Prison on espionage charges during last year's post-election unrest.

Join us for this talk at Trinity University, Northrup Hall Room 040 on Jan 25, 2011 4pm, free

Monday, January 24th, 2011
Gallery Nord
2009 N.W. Military Highway
San Antonio, TX 78213

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
Trinity University, Ruth Taylor Recital Hall
One Trinity Place
San Antonio, TX 78212

Pre-concert talk at 7 pm!
Concert at 7:30 pm!
Reception and meet the artists afterwards.

Click here to download the program in Adobe PDF format.