Lida Abdul

Lidā Abdul (; née Lidā Abdullah, ; born 1973), is an American-Afghan-born video artist and performance artist. She was born as Lida Abdullah in Kabul in 1979 and fled the country as a child during the Soviet Invasion. She went on to live in India, Germany, and the United States.

Her work has been featured at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem Netherlands and Miami Cantral, CAC Centre d'art contemporain de Brétigny and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. Her work has also been exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan.

She lives and works in Los Angeles and Kabul.

Early life Abdul fled Afghanistan in December 1979 with the threat of the Soviet invasion, making her a refugee to India, Germany and the United States, and thus is an "artistic nomad". The Russian-Afghan conflict goes back to 1838. Autocratic Russia (and later the USSR) had expansionist goals, continually competing with Great Britain for Central Asian territory. Historically, Afghanistan's goals have been independence, maintenance of territory and the security of the throne. She considers herself a nomadic artist, because of her life growing up involved a lot of moving country-to-country and keeping her away from her homeland. Abdul uses those feelings and emotions as inspiration or motivation in her art. Abdul creates political commentary, films that speak to themes of devastation, displacement culture, identity and bodies. The film depicts the rubble of a classical building in a landscape set outside of Kabul. The artist films herself dressed in black, painting the rubble white.

"Trees" (2005) Trees is a video documentary where young men discuss their reason for cutting down a tree, one that is still alive and bearing fruits. They explain their reasoning for cutting it down is because it was the site of many hangings and had to be destroyed. In the end the men cut the tree down and carried it off.

Themes Abdul's art also addresses the common issue of the depiction of Afghan people in the mass western media. It is common in western media to only report on Afghanistan in contexts of terror and war, and public western knowledge does not expand much beyond that image. Though a centrally governed country, is not unified in culture, national identity or language, though the lingua franca is Dari. She recognizes the tendency of western media to paint a stereotypical image of Afghanistan, and through her art, she hopes to humanize people who are often demonized. One such stereotype is an image of a nation overtaken by war and stripped entirely of culture, however, even in light of devastation, Afghan people still had the desire to create art. With the works of Lida Abdul and other artists in the forefront, a western audience is given an alternative way to see Afghanistan removed from the depictions of terror and devastated cities.

Politics Afghanistan is more regional than central in orientation and culture, in part because of the lack of transportation throughout the country to connect major points of interest. However, a road system connecting the three major cities was built with Soviet aid.