Lida Abdul:

March 9 to April 20, 2006
Opening Reception
Saturday, March 25, 6-8 p.m.

Over the course of five years Afghani artist Lida Abdul has created a body of work that has challenged conventional thinking about architecture. Through numerous film, video/performance and live performance works Abdul poses questions about place, community, and the meaning of our surroundings. In summer 2005, Lida Abdul produced three video works at The Banff Centre which were then presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale where she was the first official representative for Afghanistan in the Biennale’s 100 year history.  These video works Clapping with Stones,the untitled (Tree), and White House are socially engaged reappraisals of the unbuilt, destroyed, and monumental. 

Abdul’s work both confronts and reinterprets architecture, raising questions about the politics of building. Her practice considers the writings of contemporary thinkers who have also examined architecture. She navigates Bataille’s spectacular architecture of oppression, Foucault’s architecture of control, social planning and surveillance, and Vattimo’s architecture of trace and memory. 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.” 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.

- Anthony Kiendl