Bani Abidi is a Berlin-based Pakistani artist who works across video, photography, and drawing. Interested in undoing the project of patriotism, her work uses humor and absurdity to probe the structures of power, nationalism and masculinity.
Abidi’s work challenges the conventions of the nation-state, and our own complicity in its rituals, in ways that are at once deceptively light and fiercely incisive. In The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), Abidi turns her attention to the choreography of masculine authority. The piece gently mocks patriarchal power through an archive of politicians’ supposedly reassuring hand gestures and postures. Similarly, An Unforeseen Situation (2015) examines the everyday absurdities of nationalism, capturing the theatrical spectacle of citizens attempting Guinness World Records in the name of the nation. Her 2012 work Proposal for a man in the sea is a nostalgic reflection on the utopian imaginations of South Asia’s post-Independence generation. By transforming everyday archival fragments and TV scenes into poignant mediations on power, these pieces unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood and belonging.
Other works subtly extend this critique of the power of nation-states.
In her 2019 series, The man who talked until he disappeared, she painted portraits of bloggers, activists, and journalists who were either threatened, censored or disappeared by the Pakistani state for indeterminate periods of time. The portraits stand as acts of remembrance and defiance, countering the state’s efforts to control visibility and erase dissenting voices.
This exhibition highlights Abidi’s rich and layered practice — one that balances gravity with wit, inviting us to watch, laugh, and question the performances of power that shape our political worlds.
Bani Abidi was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and now works between Berlin and Karachi. She uses video, photography, drawings and sound to tell stories about performances of power and ordinary people, often through quotidian details and absurd vignettes. Abidi studied visual art at the National College of Arts in Lahore, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows internationally. Solo exhibitions have taken place at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg; and Experimenter, Kolkata, amongst others. Selected group exhibitions include WALK, Schirn Kunsthalle, 2022; Asia Pacific Triennial, 2021; Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2021; Lahore Biennial, 2018; Edinburgh Art Festival, 2016; 8th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2014; No Country, Guggenheim Museum, NY, 2013; documenta (13), 2012; Kochi-Muziris Biennial, 2012; 10th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, 2009.
