Travelers’ eyes

© lida abdul

“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, and resides there now. Abdul lived in Germany and India as a refugee after she was forced to leave Afghanistan after the former-Soviet invasion. Her work fuses the tropes of ‘Western” formalism with the numerous aesthetic traditions–Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic–that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture. She has produced work in many media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance. Her most recent work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Netherlands and Miami Central, CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain de Bretigny, and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan; She was also a featured artist at the Central Asian Biennial 2004. For the past few years, Abdul has been working in different parts of Afghanistan on projects exploring the relationship between architecture and identity.”

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Conteners is a nomadic art center organised around merchandise containers, the 6mx2,5mx3m giant Lego blocks that one encounters along all the roads and in all the ports of the world..

Each year, the Conteners team invites artists (from all artistic disciplines) in different cities to take hold of a container in order to create a work of art in it.

From one to three months , artist and container are residents in a specific territory. The container, an empty and sensitive object, functions in the same way as a sponge, absorbing and compiling the elements that are an essential part of the local and popular memory and of the work in progress. The artist seizes all these elements in order to inhabit the container that will be used as a canvas, a mini concert hall, a performance theatre, a projection space, the basis of an installation.

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On 8th March 2005, Steve Messam and six gallant volunteer artists floated seven large red inflatable balls, ranging from 6ft to over 12ft diameter on the tranquil waters of Grasmere, Cumbria. The half-mile long installation remained on the lake for 4 days before a change in wind direction and overnight gales forced the removal of the temporary piece.

The other idea of the installation is to challenge people’s ideas of things in the Lake District landscape and to raise awareness of the inovative arts scene in the Lakes.

The piece was supported by the Cumbria Tourist Board, the National Trust, the Lake District National Park Authority and South Lakes District Council.

© Tony West

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Delete!

Delettering the Public Space was a huge public installation that took place on Neubaugasse in Vienna in June 2006. During this two-week period, all signage have been covered by yellow foils and plastic. All signage (barring those needed for safety), company logos, advertising, symbols and pictograms were obscured in order to focus on various aspects to this art project organized by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.

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