Artwork by Lida Abdul, White House, 2005, 16mm film transferred to video, courtesy of the artist.
Lida Abdul is an interdisciplinary artist from Afghanistan who has been acknowledged as an artist of outstanding merit, and unique ability to speak of and about ideas of place, home, migration, belonging, memory, ruin and catastrophe. Working in film and video, as well as performance and installation, Abdul's practice as a visual artist speaks to the experience of many beyond the borders of her native country.
Abdul fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and spent many years as a refugee without a passport, living in Germany, and finally settling in the United States in Los Angeles.
She attended the MFA programme at the University of California at Irvine, a programme noted for its critical engagement. During her studies Abdul developed a body of work that prefigures her recent videos and installations, working in film and performance. Significantly, her work at that time already focused on ideas of home and place. In addition to these works, which ultimately lead to her sustained critique of issues around architecture and the built environment, she was inspired by preceding generations of conceptual and performance artists, such as Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark and Hannah Wilke to name a few. Her practice is reflective of the work of feminist artists since the 1960s, especially artists who have made the body the subject of and vehicle for addressing issues of power and identity. Her work combines the formalist histories of western art with the various traditions that collectively define the Afghan cultural and intellectual experience. Many of Abdul's works reflect the practice of endurance works in performance art—works that feature the expression of physical exertion, pushing the body to its limits in repetitive acts that foreground the physicality of the performer, and strip away any connotations of traditional theatre in which the audience is separated from the act. This places the work among the audience, as an activity unfolding in everyday life. Lida Abdul's works are particularly resonant in that they emphatically point to issues and realities of people's daily lives—ideas of home, power, memory and catastrophe.
While monumentality continues to haunt contemporary art and architectural practices in westernised societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By taking into consideration the works of artists including those from culturally diverse perspectives, the canons of modern art and architecture may be re-contextualised. Abdul's work establishes itself as a discourse around architecture, not strictly a s a formal engagement, but as a socially engaged look at spatial culture and the built environment, particularly her early 2000s works around monuments and ruins. It is a serious challenge to the concerns of contemporary architecture. A consideration of the unbuilt, destroyed, and monumental, as such finds its voice and critical importance in its radical reappraisal of the politics of building. It carries ideas of home and shelter, and how representations of spaces are relevant to everyday life. Despite the emphatic relevance of her subject matter, Abdul's work must be read poetically. While she is clear about her own subject positions as woman, Afghan, immigrant, Muslim and former refugee, her works are open to multiple readings and voices.
Abdul states, "Today technology has made possible a plurality of artistic practices that continue to challenge the notion of the work of art itself. Contemporary artists from Mexico, China, Iran, Israel and Palestine, to name just a few, are not only creating complex spaces and temporalities that seek a newer audience; they are also working as anthropologists, cultural critics, ethical philosophers and photo-journalists who are creating a textured world that is rarely found in the popular media. These artists are the wandering souls of the world who move from one place to another making art that witnesses, that challenges and that asks other questions. They are celebrated, ignored, persecuted and sometimes even killed for refusing to take sides in the game of 'us' against 'them'; they are always the innocents abroad who are often exiles in their own countries of birth...when I was finishing an art residency in Kabul, Afghanistan (2005), I realised that I am one of these artists too. As an Afghan artist, who left her country of birth a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I have tried to comprehend the disaster that has ravaged my country for more than two decades. Blanchot says, 'A disaster touches nothing but changes everything'. Afghanistan is physically destroyed, yes, but the resilience to survive persists unabated. Language, notions of domesticity and perceptions of the other are all transformed radically, to the extent that survivors/refugees often refuse to talk about what they went through. We have all known the history of this silence. These nomadic artists give voice to the silence amongst us through their works."
Abdul's work continued to evolve upon her return to Afghanistan in 2005, both in content, urgency and formal qualities. She worked predominantly in 16mm film which she then transferred to video. She found a distinct voice, and it is no wonder she has since been an invited participant as the first-ever official representation of Afghanistan at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and subsequently exhibited her work in Sydney, the Gwangju Biennial and the São Paulo Biennial and The Banff Centre (2006). In 2007 she will participate in the New Zealand Biennial. She was also commissioned by FRAC Lorraine in Metz, France, to produce two new works, and has lectured and performed internationally. In the production of her recent work in Afghanistan, Abdul faced various calamities and hardships that are perhaps to be expected in producing artwork in a militarised zone. But beyond these challenges, she has sought to support the work of other artists in and around Kabul and promote the awareness of and opportunities for other film and video makers in the region. While filming new works there, Abdul worked with a team to present a screening of artist videos in Kabul. Despite the fact that Afghanistan was at the time in the news and on television daily around the world, perceptions of it are limited. Abdul says, "Given its tragic history over the past two decades, Afghanistan's problems have become synonymous with the real or fictional threats to 'civilisation' itself. This is unfortunately what many believe and in doing so they reduce a whole people to a monolithic perception. Drugs, warlords, women's subjugation, lawlessness: all of these—doubtless real problems—are the lenses through which Afghanistan is seen in the popular media of the world. Is there any surprise then that there is little if anything known about the art and culture of Afghanistan? There are many 'Afghanistans'." Abdul further states, "For me art is always a petition for another world, a momentary shattering of what is comfortable so that we become more sophisticated in reclaiming the present. The new wandering souls of the globe, the new global refuseniks—stubborn, weak, persecuted, and strong–will continue to make art as long as people believe in easy solutions and closures of the most banal kinds."
