As an artist who works both in performance and video art, Lida Abdul creates poetic spaces that allow the viewer to interrogate the familiar and the personal. Her work is guided by a ritualized formalism that insinuates the immediacy of myth and the playfulness of a mind seeking to understand the surrounding world. In many ways, witnessing her pieces is like attempting to understand the riddles of the gestures and the repetitions that highlight her work. Abdul's work is located at the intersection between art and architecture; it invites the viewer to see the unfolding of new forms but never resolves the contradictions and the paradoxes, the purpose of which seems to be to make us doubt our claims of understanding. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, Lida Abdul lived in Germany and India as a refugee before moving to the US. Her work fuses the formalist traditions she was trained in with the numerous aesthetic traditions, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and nomadic, that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture.
