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For immediate release
June 9, 2005

The Banff International Curatorial Institute and Walter Phillips Gallery support first Afghani artist at Venice Biennale

This month, with the support of The Banff Centre’s Banff International Curatorial Institute and the Walter Phillips Gallery, Afghanistan will be officially represented for the first time at the Venice Biennale. Afghani artist Lida Abdul will show a series of videos in the Afghanistan Pavilion at the 51^st Biennale – bringing work that poses questions about home and identity to one of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions in the world.

This spring, The Banff Centre sponsored Abdul to edit and complete post-production on her Biennale work at the Centre. She had first come to Banff a year ago as part of a creative residency called Intra-Nation, which brought artists from around the world to do work on the theme of independent cultures within politically and geographically defined nations. The Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery will present Abdul’s Biennale exhibition in 2006, and is publishing a catalogue to document the exhibition for both Banff and Venice.

“Over the course of five years Lida Abdul has created a body of work that has challenged conventional thinking about architecture and our relationship to it,” says Anthony Kiendl, director of the Banff International Curatorial Institute. “Through numerous film, video/performance and live performance works Abdul poses questions about place, community and the meaning of our surroundings. She delineates how our built environment is still often taken for granted, as a neutral or imperceptible background, or separate from politics, justice or identity.”

“Lida Abdul travels both literally and figuratively between Afghanistan and the West. Based in Los Angeles, she also teaches in Germany. A refugee who fled Afghanistan as a child following the Soviet invasion, she traveled between several countries before finally settling in the United States. Figuratively, Abdul crosses borders and engages perceptions of Muslim women, traversing in her work territories of identity, the body, space and architecture—all of which explore how to represent the unrepresentable.”

“Engaging both with the long history of Western art and the less well-known histories of indigenous cultures that one finds in Afghanistan, Lida’s work is suffused with the immediacy of ritual and beauty of meditative forms,” says Said Ismael Noori, who commissioned Abdul for the Afghanistan Pavilion.

For The Banff Centre, this project represents an unequalled opportunity for Canada to support the export of new cultural work from Afghanistan to the world. “I believe that it is fitting that our country supports contemporary Afghan art as a component of Canada’s diplomatic and development contribution to that country,” Kiendl adds. “Venice is the most highly attended and high-profile international event to do so.”

Born in Kabul shortly before the Soviet invasion, Lida Abdul was raised and educated in the United States, where she received an MFA in Fine Art at the University of California at Irvine. Her work spans a variety of media, and bridges the gap between the traditions of Western art and thousands of years of Afghan cultural and intellectual experience.

The Banff Centre’s Banff International Curatorial Institute was able to support the production and publication of Abdul’s work as part of its ongoing visual art research project called Informal Architecture, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Informal Architecture explores the interpretation of architecture from unconventional perspectives, with an emphasis on structures that are temporary, nomadic, or contingent.

For more information on Visual Arts and the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre: http://www.banffcentre.ca/va/