Lida Abdul – ‘A Beautiful Encounter With Chance’


Afghan artist Lida Abdul describes the chance encounter that became the basis for her elegiac film Dome. Abdul calls her pieces ‘anti-monuments’, and in Dome we see a small boy dancing alone in the centre of a bombed-out building in Kabul. The boy’s circling movements trace the shape of the roofless dome as he looks up at the sky, then comes the sinister throbbing of whirling rotor blades as a helicopter passes overhead.

Cite this page as: Tate, "Lida Abdul – ‘A Beautiful Encounter With Chance’," in Smarthistory, September 10, 2021, accessed March 28, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/lida-abdul-a-beautiful-encounter-with-chance/.