My name is Adel Abidin. I am an artist, working mainly in videos, video installations, installations, and most recently, photography. I’ve been living and working in Helsinki, Finland since 2001. Before that I lived in Baghdad, where I was born and raised. My visual discussions focus on issues such as cultural alienation, identity and marginalization. Humor, sarcasm and irony are central to my language. When I was in art school in Baghdad I worked mainly as a painter, but while working toward my MFA in Finland my work began to shift. Since 2004, my main practice in art is based on videos, video installations, and interactive installations. Most recently I have started working with photography. |
Adel Abidin
My name is Adel Abidin. I am an artist, working mainly in videos, video installations, installations, and most recently, photography. I’ve been living and working in Helsinki, Finland since 2001. Before that I lived in Baghdad, where I was born and raised. My visual discussions focus on issues such as cultural alienation, identity and marginalization. Humor, sarcasm and irony are central to my language.
When I was in art school in Baghdad I worked mainly as a painter, but while working toward my MFA in Finland my work began to shift. Since 2004, my main practice in art is based on videos, video installations, and interactive installations. Most recently I have started working with photography. I work with video in order to execute more comprehensive representations of my views and ideas—when making paintings in the past it frustrated me not to be able to present moving images and larger scales of view. Media art allows me to show my ideas as they come to me, which at the same time presents the viewer with the possibility to interact fully with what I want to say. I think that the new ways of creating work—through live action, video, and animation—can begin to transcend what is unknowable, whether it is hard to reach because it is in a child’s imagined world, or because the truth of that world is so far from comprehension. The “play” I often use in my work is my own attempt to get even closer to difficult or hard-to-reach experiences. I am constantly toying with ways and mediums to communicate this.