Lida Abdul is the first artist from her country to represent Afghanistan at the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale in 2005.   Her art explores issues of migration, remembrance and memory through performance and video. Born in Kabul but forced to leave her country with her family after Soviet invasion, Abdul’s work provides a thorough examination of the role of monuments and ruins in contemporary culture as a counter-narrative to dominant preoccupations in the politics and meaning of the built environment. It is her itinerant past and present that informs her perceptions of home and space. 

Abdul considers herself as a nomadic artist whose art explore notions of homeland and exile, in which the battle-scarred landscape of Afghanistan is a central character.  Using film, photography, installation and live performance, she is invested in exploring the aftermath of war from the perspective of Afghans who have no choice but to live with the seemingly never ending destruction and chaos. It is her focus on bodies and landscapes and their complex interaction that she is able to create compelling pieces that critique the legacies of war. 

In one of her most well- known short films, White House (2005) she takes on the hypocrisy of the American government that under the garb of the redevelopment of Afghanistan is actually benefitting only American conglomerates. The five-minute- long film is shot in the outskirts of Kabul, where we see the black-clad artist painting white the bombed ruins of what once the former presidential palace. The act of painting the rubble with white paint is at once absurd and futile, but the gesture of whitewashing is loaded with symbolism in Abdul’s film. The bombed building in the film is a structure, a part of the built environment that predates the ‘War on Terror’ and is a witness to the violence that the war has unleashed. As opposed to monuments that “cover things up” and present a re-branded history, ruins “preserve the history” as Abdul explains^[i]. They  remain standing as reminder of loss and a promise of revitalization that is still to come. Through the film, Abdul avoids falling in the rhetoric of mourning and forgiveness by keeping intact what remains of the past—the ruins. She revitalises the ruins to open up new spaces of thinking about society, identity and history.

Sources

1. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/lida-abdul
2. https://2017arth4919.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/cavallini-on-abdul.pdf
3. https://www.artsy.net/article/artasiapacific-20-slash-20-lida-abduls-white-house
4. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/about/feminist_art_base/lida-abdul

^[i] See Lida Abdul’s interview in Roberto Cavallini paper titled “Counter-monuments and promise: reading Lida Abdul’s ‘White House’ and ‘Clapping with Stones’ video-performances”.