Lida Abdul

Born in 1973 in Kabul, she lives in Afghanistan and in Chicago (USA).

As the author of films, videos, photographs, installations and performances, Lida Abdul left Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded the country, living with her parents in refugee camps in India and then Germany, before settling in the United States. “ In her somewhat enigmatic images which are sensitive and critical poems, she films life in spite of everything, and the resistance of “ordinary singularities” (Evelyne Toussaint, “Lida Abdul, Afghane. Les forces de l'art”, in La Fonction critique de l'art, to be published by La Lettre volée, Brussels in January 2009).

What does the theme “Wherever I go, I am already” do for you ?

I'm never sure where I'm going. Arrival is always a place, always a “there”, but the pleasure—and the obsession—is not knowing. For me, art is like a walk haunted by so many ghosts which can take me where they want to—and I imagine that there's a certain pleasure in letting yourself be taken somewhere, in the immortal world of “Star Trek”, the land-where-nobody-has-ever-been-before.

What are you showing at the Printemps de Septembre?

The video titled En transit . Around Kabul I saw on an old football pitch the metal skeletons of two military aircraft riddled with bullet holes, probably shot down a few years earlier, their insides looted over the years. Seen from different angles, the aircraft look like birds trying to fly, or dinosaur skeletons. This work operates both like a performance and a video, made as it was with about 70 school children aged between five and nine. Each one tries to cover the aircraft with cotton. They thus try to create an imaginary world by (naively) transforming war memories into an attempt at conservation and change. They will surround the aircraft with ropes and try to get it to fly like a kite.