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VISUAL ART
Lida Abdul
Afghanistan's history is a storied one. Alongside civil war and sectarian infighting, the landlocked country's strategic location has left it subject to colonial and imperial assaults, from the Scythians and Mongols up to the Anglo-Afghan wars, the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the Bush administration's "War on Terror." Like Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan is presented in the West as part of a narrative refracted through ideology, specifically a neo-conservative one spun into a clash of civilizations, where the population is rendered mute.
Lida Abdul locates her work within this zone. She fled Afghanistan with her family during the Soviet occupation, and lived as a refugee in India, Germany and the United States, while earning a degree in political science along with her MFA, and eventually going on to represent Afghanistan in its debut at the Venice Biennale in 2005. A survey of her work appeared recently in Vancouver at two venues. Starting at The Western Front, five television screens presented an archive of her earlier works. Abdul has acknowledged the influence of performance artists like Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, and the sober and earnest style of both are apparent, as she speaks through gesture and object about identity and displacement in a variety of scenarios. She drags a dollhouse through a city's streets, a line of books nailed to a wall is hosed down, Magnetic Poetry tiles spill from her mouth, or, unambiguously, a bucketful of toy soldiers and warcraft rains down on her from above. These pieces act as a prelude for her later work; elsewhere in the gallery, a large projection of Afghan horsemen attempting to pull...