I have tried to comprehend the disaster that has ravaged my country for more than two decades. Language, notions of domesticity and perceptions of the other are all transformed so radically that survivors/refugees often refuse to talk. We have all known the history of this silence. There is always the fear that the works of these dissident artists, too close to an unfolding ‘politics’ may compromises their aesthetic intentions. In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with the space of reverie, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to perform the ‘blank spaces’ that are formed when everything is taken away from people. – Lida Abdul