Armed with just paint and ideas, Iranian Neda Taiyebi turns abandoned military vehicles in Afghanistan into art

Neda Taiyebi does not want to be typecast. Female artists in Muslim countries, she says, are all too often pigeonholed as role models for the kind of change westerners would like to see in those countries.

But Taiyebi insists she is no activist, no voice of the oppressed, no torchbearer for female emancipation.

Still, at first glance her work � giving old tanks and military vehicles a paint job that involves exuberant, playful patterns � seems thick with symbolism.

On a dusty plain in Kabul�s Khair Khana neighbourhood, children are crawling on and jumping off an old Soviet-era tank that Taiyebi splashed in goldenrod � a colour named after the plant of the same name � and adorned with flowers.

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