Contemporary cultural/artistic practices appear to be concerned with issue of othernesses,in all its representations, and this phenomenon is further motivated by the ascendancy of the global art festivals (Documenta, bi-triennials) that engage just as much with the histories of art as with contemporary political and social histories. Today technology has made possible a plurality of artistic practices that continue to challenge the notion of the work of art itself.  Contemporary artists from Mexico, China, Iran, Israel and Palestine, to name just a few, are not only creating complex  spaces and  temporalities that seek a newer audience; they are also working as  anthropologist, cultural critics, ethical philosophers and photojournalists who are creating a textured world that is rarely found in the popular media,  Theseartists are the wandering souls of the world who move from one place to another making art that witnesses, that challenges and that asks other questions.  They are celebrated, ignored, persecuted and sometimes even killed for refusing to take sides in the game of ‘us’ against ‘them;’ they are always the innocents abroad who are often exiles in their own countries of birth.

The works of these Afghan, Chinese or Cuban artists, to name just a few, create new spaces that call for a new viewer/reader, one who is  acutely aware of the oscillation between the global and particular (between an inherited identity and an acquired one through domicile) that artists have to negotiate in order to create heterogeneous works.  This past summer when I was finishing an art residency in Kabul, Afghanistan, I realized that I am one of these artists too.  As an Afghan artist, who left her country of birth a few years after the former Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I have tried to comprehend the disaster that has ravaged my country for more than two decades.  Blanchot says, A disaster  touches nothing, but changes everything.  Afghanistan is physically destroyed, yes, but the resilience to survive persists unabated.  Language, notions of domesticity and perceptions of the other are all transformed radically, to the extent that survivors/refugees often refuse to talk about what they  went through.  We have all known the history of this silence.  These nomadic artists give voice to the silence amongst us through their works. 

There is always the fear that the work of dissident artist, or one too close to an unfolding ‘politics’ compromises its aesthetic intentions; the fear that form might become subordinate to content.  As well-intentioned as this critique might appear to be,one has to  ask: Whose politics?  In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of  politics with the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to perform the ‘blank spaces’ that  areformed when everything is taken away from people.  How do we come face to face with ‘nothing’ with ‘emptiness’ where there was something earlier.  I was a refugee  myself for a few years, moving from one country to another, knowing  full well that at every juncture I was a guest, who at any moment might to  asked to leave.  The refugee’s world is a portable one, allowing for  easy movement between borders.  It is one that can be taken away as easily as it was given: provisionally and with a little anxiety on the part of the host. 

Sometimes people say, I am post-identity, post-nationetc.. I don’t know what this means.  For me the most difficult thing is precisely to go past the memory of an event; my works are the forms of my failed attempts to, what others call, transcend.  But what?  For me art is always a petition for another world , a momentary shattering of what is comfortable so that we become more sophisticated in reclaiming the present. The new wandering souls of the globe, the new global refuseniks —stubborn, weak, persecuted, strong—will continue to make art as long as people believe in easy solution and closures of the most banal kinds.

Lida Abdul