AS part of Refugee Week, Libraries ACT and the NGO Afghan Women on the Move are hosting a small exhibition called “The Power of Colour”.

The artworks are by Lida Farahin, accountant-turned painter and a director and volunteer treasurer with the community-based body, which represents the interests of Afghan women and girls living in Australia.

The show came out of a leadership course for women from Afghani background in Canberra which, supported by Libraries ACT, has been running since September.

In a walk-through, Farahin told me how her artworks depicted not just women in Afghanistan, but in seven countries, including the Ukraine, Uganda and Pakistan.

At age eight, she told me, she and her family travelled 17 days through the desert on camels to get out of Afghanistan.

Once here in Australia, she said, she wanted to study art, but became an accountant instead and worked in the corporate world.

After the organisation started gathering different women’s stories, she said, she had created these paintings, showing women through the frame of an eye.

Flowers, which feature in her paintings, illustrate what she described as “a more colourful side of the country,” suggesting, along with the pain, “signs of humanity”.

According to Maryam Zahid, founder and CEO of Afghan Women on the Move, the idea was to create a lens through which women could share their experiences and knowledge.

Reflecting on the location of the show, Zahid says she was 15 when she had escaped with her family to Pakistan before migrating to Australia and first stepped in a library when she was 17  — she wasn’t in a library again until age 21 and was astonished by the empowerment the experience gave her.

“We need to start from the grassroots,” Zahid said, adding that through closed online groups she had been able open up to women in cooking shows online where, while outside it might be culturally unacceptable to laugh and joke, they were able to share stories and experiences.

Afghan Women on the Move has outlets in in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, aimed at seeing women step up to leadership roles and had so far served more than 400 women in Australia, she said.

“The Power of Colour”, ACT Heritage Library, Fyshwick, until July 1.