Security Barriers A-L, 2008

The artist Bani Abidi is a nomad of two cultures. Born and brought up in Karachi, Pakistan, she lives and works today in Delhi, India. These biographical details run through her humorous works that depict the cultural and political differences and similarities between the two countries and their conflict-ridden border. In her work Security Barriers A-L, Abidi employs temporary architectural elements for an analysis of political manifestations of state violence, the maintenance of state power, and national strategies of demarcation.
In twelve prints, the artist catalogs the various models of security barriers in her hometown of Karachi, which she first photographed on-site, before going on to digitally rework them. She found the various constructions in front of embassies, consulates, at airports and intersections. Arranged in rows of three, the brightly colored, clear, and sharply contoured vector drawings against a white background are like objects featuring in a glossy catalog. One almost feels tempted to order one of these beautiful objects for the front yard, even though their design idiom is unambiguously that of a barrier. Only the attached titles establish the link to their original context and the related strategies of isolation and demarcation: type H stands out among the drawings with its all too vigorous expression of political superiority, while the flower-bedecked barrier in front of the British Deputy High Commission of the former colony almost seems smarmy. (KB)

…so he starts singing, 2000

In …so he starts singing, one of Bani Abidi’s early works, a young woman enthusiastically recounts the plots of twenty-six Bollywood films. From among the plots thus narrated over the course of an interview project the artist carried out with her very cinephile roommate, Abidis edited a single, absurd story which was related in all of three and half minutes. This quick run-through better summarizes Bollywood as a phenomena than do any of the many classificatory attempts by film theory: its formulaic character – angry parents oppose a pair of lovers, a ménage à trois delays involvement, villains impede the happiness of the parties concerned – allows for the creation of a clearly formulated and globally intelligible world of images. Reduced to a single narrative, the stereotypical schema stands out all the more.
The work’s narrator is representative – not least by way of her sharply defined dialect and interjections in the Urdu language (the national language of Pakistan) – of the local cinema audience which becomes sucked into the undertow of images, and which internalizes the Bollywood stories and their pictures of everyday life, fashion, and love, before situating them in their own lives. At the same time, the simple, melodramatic narrative strategy levels cross-cultural hurdles and creates points of reference for an international audience that draws its ideas about life, morals, and culture from the Indian subcontinent. Abidi thus evolves an ironic commentary on the one-dimensionality of globally circulating images, which still remain firmly attached to stereotypes. (KB)