Media Release

For immediate release
March 9, 2006

Afghan artist Lida Abdul presents Venice video work at the Walter Phillips Gallery

Lida Abdul, Curated by Anthony Kiendl
March 9 to April 6
Opening reception: Saturday, March 25 • 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Meet the artist for a walk-through tour: Sunday, March 26, 2 to 4 pm
PLAN B: a new curatorial space
Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Information: 403.762.6281

The work of Afghan artist Lida Abdul comes back to The Banff Centre this month for an exhibition in the Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. Abdul, who works in film, video, and performance art, completed her most recent video projects at the Centre last spring before showing them at the 2005 Venice Biennale. It was the first time that Afghanistan had been officially represented in Venice.

Curated by the Centre’s director of visual arts, Anthony Kiendl, Lida Abdul can be seen in the Walter Phillips Gallery’s PLAN B curatorial space through April 6. The exhibition is made up of three original video projects, Clapping with Stones, the untitled (Tree), and White House, each one an examination of the relationship between architecture and identity in post-war Afghanistan, and a challenge to contemporary thinking about architecture.

“As philosopher Gianni Vattimo states, ‘Just like philosophers, today’s architects shall have to accept to conceive of their function less as creators than as interpreters,’” Kiendl says. “Abdul as an interpreter then is also perhaps an architect, putting forward alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation, and interpretation of space and its cultural implications.”

Born in Kabul in 1973, Abdul lived in Germany and India as a refugee before moving to the United States, where she now lives and works in Los Angeles. Fusing traditional and contemporary methods with influences of Buddhism, Islamic, Hindu, pagan, and nomadic aesthetics, her work has been seen most recently at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, Netherlands, and the Centre d’art contemporain de Bretagne in France.

Lida Abdul is presented concurrently with the Alberta Association of Architects’ Banff Sessions 06 conference, along with an exhibition by photographer Lynne Cohen in the Centre’s Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building through June 18. The Banff International Curatorial Institute will also publish a catalogue for this exhibition, which will be available at the Gallery. Also on at the Walter Phillips Gallery is Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk, through March 26. The Gallery will be closed on Friday, April 14 and Sunday, April 1.

For a print-ready, downloadable image from Lida Abdul:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/media_room/images/wpg/default.htm

More information on the Walter Phillips Gallery:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/