Bani Abidi’s works span video, photography and drawing. They look at the fragile construction of the nation-state and the everyday rituals through which power asserts itself, nationalism becomes habit, authority becomes performance, and masculinity tries to reassure itself through the body. Her materials are often drawn from lived experience, but mixed with political themes: nationhood, borders, memory, erasure, displacement, etc. Humour, irony and questioning are central to her method. They allow her to reveal the nation-states and borders (especially those born of colonial partition) as recent and often arbitrary constructs.
In The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), Abidi turns her attention to the choreography of masculine authority. Detached from speeches and contexts, she assembles an archive of political gestures—raised palms, clenched fists, pointed fingers. Similarly, the theatricality of nationalism reappears in other works, where patriotism is not heroic but rehearsed and exhausted. The man who talked until he disappeared (2022) presents portraits of journalists, activists and bloggers silenced by the Pakistani state. These make clear that disappearance is an instrument of governance and fear. In the same year, for her show in India, she honoured Indian women who were at the barricades of recent protests – women who were censored, imprisoned, and in one case assassinated, for speaking truth against power.
Across these works, Abidi proposes an ethics of looking. She seeks to expose the absurdity and violence of the political spectacle, and the ways it divides people psychologically, emotionally and geographically. Abidi invites us to inhabit the unstable borders between laughter and unease, to unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood and belonging and to question the performances that sustain political power. She asks us to look again, to laugh, and to remain alert to the frail illusions that shape our contemporary worlds.