ARTISTS TALKING

Born in Kabul in 1973, Lida Abdul has returned to live there. Kim Dhillon looks at her practice, working accross various media, that fuses Western formalist traditions with numerous aesthetic influences.

Background

Born in Kabul in 1973, Lida Abdul has returned to live there. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan she lived in Germany and India, having left her home country as a refugee with her family in the late 1970s. Trained in the US, and having lived in Los Angeles, Abdul’s artwork fuses Western formalist traditions with numerous aesthetic influences both Eastern and Western – Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic to name a few – that have, in turn, collectively influenced both Afghan art and culture and her practice.

Abdul has produced work in media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance. Her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, 2005 (as the first artist to represent Afghanistan in the Biennale’s existence), Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem Netherlands and Miami Cantral, CAC Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. She was a featured artist at the Central Asian Biennial 2004. Recently she has relocated to Kabul, working on projects that explore the relationship between architecture and identity in contemporary Afghanistan.

The roles of the artist

But Abdul’s biographical details alone shouldn’t prescribe the reading of her work. Her experience and her artwork are not simply an Afghan experience, but a human one. With great attention to detail, she interrogates the landscape and crumbling buildings around her to develop an oeuvre that speaks beyond Afghanistan’s borders and has engaged audiences both locally and in the international art ‘world’.

Abdul’s work both confronts and reinterprets architecture, raising questions about what buildings mean to the sites and contexts in which they’re erected, and what remains in their place when they fall down. Curator Anthony Kiendl has suggested wide-ranging influences on her practice, from “Bataille’s spectacular architecture of oppression, [to] Foucault’s architecture of control, social planning and surveillance, and Vattimo’s architecture of trace and memory.”¹ Abdul, Kiendl proposes, is an artist, an interpreter, and an architect, putting forward alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation, and interpretation of space and its cultural implications.

Her work is ultimately contemporary, informed by a Diasporic or migratory experience, and not rooted to any one national school or movement. She states: “I belong to many worlds and they each enrich who I am and I guess some would say that this is a recipe for anxiety because you don’t know where you belong. I’d answer that living in between allows me perspectives that are denied to those who are consoled by notions of country of land etc. I do think that this in-betweenness is slowly becoming the norm.”²

Stills from White House (2005) resemble Grecian ruins or images of sites of archaeological digs. Pillars and cross beams stand defiant to the pile of rubble encroaching them from the ground up. The pile is half white, and half a darker colour; the lighter having been painted by the artist. There’s a latent disjuncture within her artwork: that while remaining engaged to contemporary politics, the scene she sets also connotes a sense of ancientness.

As a testament to the aesthetics of a landscape in war, Abdul’s work is particularly timeless. For while history repeats itself, and buildings will get knocked down by conflict in the future and have in the past, as Milan Kundera has recently written: “Art isn’t there to be some great mirror registering all of History’s ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions. Art is not a village band marching dutifully along at History’s heels. It is there to create it’s own history.”³

¹ Anthony Kiendl, Lida Abdul, release for Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre

² Lida Abdul, excerpts from interview with Kim Dhillon, March 2007

³ Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, translated by Linda Asher, Harper Collins, New York, 2007

The role of art

When asked to describe her practice, Abdul says:

“There are so many degrees of influence that go into making a particular work. Sometime it’s an image in the newspaper or something I’ve read in the newspaper or even something I remember from my travels in Afghanistan. I find whatever I say about the work will sounds unconvincing because if the work is strong it will be much more than the sum of all that led to it.

There is something that tells me that at some point in the process of making the work I don’t know in what direction I must go in and it’s this initial control and final loss that defines the boundaries between which I work. I feel that when I am done with a work, I am paradoxically accepting that I can’t go any further.”

Her work exists on its own terms, not offering solutions to problems political or otherwise: “I knew that the country was destroyed by more than twenty years of war and that the psyches of the people were probably so damaged that my going there to do art seemed rather inconsiderate. Did they really need art classes? Would I be exploiting their suffering if I made pieces incorporating documentary techniques?”¹

¹ Excerpt from artist’s statement with Lida Abdul, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, Universes in Universe

On returning to Afghanistan to work

Following her return to Afghanistan, Abdul has become more prolific, and her work well received. She explains her reason for the move:

“What I saw was happening in Afghanistan, what I remembered from having grown up there and what I wanted to do all joined together and I felt that I had to put myself in that situation so that something will happen. I didn’t know what, but I couldn’t simply sit in Europe and just witness from a distance.

Of course being in Kabul changed everything. It split my vision so to speak. Every time I thought I understood something, another way of thinking about it emerged. I guess one could call it some sort of empathetic relationship with the world and with my own self that still remembered the tragedy of what I saw in Afghanistan. I think that slowly, most art will begin to be situated somewhere between autobiography, history and engagement.”

She continues:

“While I was living abroad, Afghanistan was a jumble of what I remembered, what I was told, what I’d read in the media, and of course what I imagined it to be. After I’d been in Kabul a few days, I went through a sea change. I forgot my original intentions of going there and soon I was trying to just hold on a sense of reality that would allow me to go day to day without having a breakdown. The scenes of suffering were almost biblical and I suppose it was naive of me not to expect them. I knew that the works I made in Kabul would have to be poetic pieces that were as much about my relationship with the place as they were about some attempt to insinuate a direction out of the quagmire we Afghans found ourselves in. I knew there had to be healing and that in my own small way I could open up a space for that. The pieces I made there are both personal and political at the same time because I made them literally out in the open and involved people I met in the streets.”¹

“Making work in Kabul and its environs is very difficult and oftentimes heartbreaking because you see the suffering of people everywhere and initially you have to work to position yourself emotionally and physically in a space, which possesses very different assumptions about everyday life. I felt like a director trying to create what some have called ‘temporary autonomous zones,’ in a world where there was little certainty at a daily level.”

¹ Excerpt from artist’s statement with Lida Abdul, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, Universes in Universe

International exhibitions, biennales, and mega-shows

Having been selected to exhibit in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and in the 2006 Sao Paolo Biennale, and 2007’s Sharjah Biennial, Adbul has been embraced into the bosom of international mega-shows and the art world. Abdul views such inclusion as a valuable opportunity for further promotion of her work and the ideas she’s putting forward to reach new audiences. She says: “I just hope that through my work people can possibly challenge some of the clichés that get bandied about about the Afghans. The sad part is that there had to be a war for there to be some desire to know the other.”

Buildings and stones: The ruin and the anti-monument

The Buddhas of Bamyan, a Unesco world heritage site, were two monumental statues of Buddha carved in the 6th Century directly into a cliff side in central Afghanistan on the Silk Road. Adbul’s work consistently interrogates such sites of buildings and monuments. In Bamiyan (Clapping with Stones) (2005), twenty men wearing black clothes stand in front of the remains of one of the Buddha statues knocking stones against stones. The Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in a crackdown on un-Islamicism in the country (having survived and been untouched through other invasions and conflicts). Abdul’s work avoids melancholy or nostalgia by adhering to simple gestures or symbols: She explains it as, “a symbol that something has been lost, and the only thing to remain is the memory of it”.

Unesco and many countries have pledged support to rebuild the Buddhas; the Afghan government has reportedly commissioned Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata to recreate the Bamyan Buddhas using fourteen laser systems to project the image of the Buddhas onto the cliff where they once stood. Powered by sun and wind, the lasers will cost an estimated $9 million. The subtle action of Abdul’s gesture to acknowledge the ruin seems to offer far more to the monument now gone, despite its more economical budget.

In White House (2005), Lida Abdul paints ruins in her hometown Kabul white. She explains: “They were very close to the military base and knowing this made the making of this piece a rather uncanny experience. At some level, I wanted to make a sculpture that was as much an answer to those who see destruction as a solution to more difficult problems. At the same time, I wanted to preserve these ruins for the future. Just as ruins. Not monuments.”¹ Similarly, the 16mm film (transferred to DVD) What we saw upon awaking (2006), shows a dozen men in black robes pulling on something with white ropes. We don’t see what they’re pulling on until much later in the film – a ruined house.

Abdul makes no mention of the other White House to which the title of the previous work alludes, and to which the destruction can (at least partly) be attributed to, but the resonance is there. And this is where Abdul’s work is most successful, in conveying complex politics and concepts with subtle gestures and without being didactic. Which is, after all, what we most often want from art today.

¹ Excerpt from artist’s statement with Lida Abdul, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, Universes in Universe

Radical positions

This profile was commissioned as part of
a-n Collections: Radical positions

Kim Dhillon

Kim Dhillon is a Canadian curator and writer. She lives and works in London.

First published: a-n.co.uk April 2007