Ice Performance
October 28, 2005
About the Program
In today's culture repetition, the insistence on what one considers necessary, can often shock people because of the single-mindedness of the action. People are discomforted when they see the raw stubbornness of a resolve such as the one poetically depicted in Lida Abdul's performance. The act of eroding the cold hardness of a slab of ice is an apt metaphor for the trajectory of our thoughts: the initial hardness of thoughts and ideas; the later fluidity that comes from its mingling with action; and finally the ghostly quality of the mingling of action and thinking that is the province of art making itself.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.
Artist
Lida AbdulIdentifier
2005.1028 VIDPart of the series
LIVE Biennial of Performance Art 2005Collection
grunt gallery Programming ArchiveLocation
Video In Studios1965 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 3C1
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations
In copyright. For uses beyond Fair Dealing, research requests, corrections, takedown requests, or other inquiries, please contact grunt gallery: archives@grunt.ca