“They Died Laughing”: Bani Abidi at Gropius Bau

The Pakistani artist highlights the absurdity of everyday life.

Bani Abidi’s work takes inspiration from everyday life, focusing on its darkly absurd aspects which she highlights in her moving image and visual artwork. Curated by Natasha Ginwala, “They Died Laughing” at Gropius Bau in Berlin presents a large body of work developed in the past two decades of her artistic career, bringing together moving image and print-based works.

Berlin- and Karachi-based, Bani Abidi was born in 1971 in Karachi, Pakistan, and studied Visual Art at the National College of Arts in Lahore and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the past twenty years, she has been developing a unique approach to filmmaking, creating moving image works that access the absurd potential of reality. She makes use of hidden narratives of cities and people, blurring the boundaries between fictional and literary accounts. In her videos, drawings and photographs, Abidi features minor protagonists that shape history in their everyday life and with small acts of resistance within the broader context of state power and its dyanmics, as well as ideas and expressions of nationalism.

Abidi’s characteristic filmic language is quietly humorous, often employing non-actors and choreographing crowds to present carefully scripted and directed moments that examine the security infrastructure of daily life, and record the ridiculous gestural routines of bureaucracy, power and nationalism. In “Security Barriers A-Z”, for instance, the artist charts an inventory of security barriers spread across Karachi since the last decade, recording “the broader architecture of control seen through the smallest unit”, as the exhibition booklet reads. These security barriers can be found at airports, embassies, diplomatic compounds and streets across major cities in Pakistan, especially since after the onset of the United States’ “War on Terror” starte in 2001, and fragment the urban landscape, demarcating civil society. They act as “blue prints for paranoia and militarization in the metropolis” and “speak of the geopolitical frontiers of a divided subcontinent where fear and suspicion reign over a people with a shared history”.

Bani Abidi, Section Yellow: Two of Two, 2010; Section Yellow: Untitled, 2010. Installation view of "Bani Abidi: They Died Laughing", Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2019. Photo: Mathias Völzke. Courtesy the artist & Experimenter, Kolkata.
Bani Abidi, Section Yellow: Two of Two, 2010; Section Yellow: Untitled, 2010. Installation view of “Bani Abidi: They Died Laughing”, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2019. Photo: Mathias Völzke. Courtesy the artist & Experimenter, Kolkata.

Meanwhile, the photographic and video series “Section Yellow” is an example of Abidi’s work that examines the routines of bureaucracy, and specifically the bureaucratic rituals and security protocols acting on people seeking to commence journeys. The Distance from Here is a real-time scenography around visa processes. Redirecting Lines highlights the disciplinary architecture of immigration spaces, especially around Islamabad. The poster Two of Two shows how the assembly of files and documents form a unique landscape of bureaucracy.

Through fictionalised narratives, Abidi tells stories of the cities she has lived in, traversing individual experiences and commenting on complex questions of patriotism, within the context of power struggles and the geopolitical relations between India and Pakistan. In early video works, the artist uses humour and irony to discuss issues of border politics. Examples of such works are Mangoes (1999) and The News (2001). In Mangoes, two female protagonists from both countries (India and Pakistan) are seen in a double act played by Abidi, in which they converse and reminisce about home and childhood memories centered around eating mangoes. In The News, two news anchors report the same international incident – a slapstick tale of cross-border egg pilfering – from their respective national perspectives.

Later works explore the dynamics of power, and the weight of nationalism and patriotism, and how sentiments of collective and personal ambition construct an image of society. Death at a 30 Degree Angle and A Proposal for a Man in the Sea illustrate such concepts, by featuring a real life protagonist, the octogenarian Indian sculptor Ram Sutar, and a fictional cast that includes a small-time politician in the first work. Ram Sutar was a maker of political statuary for sixty years, creating statues that were once filled with idealism and ethical promise, and gradually became expressions of the political egos and corrupt games of the new regimes. One such character is portrayed in Death at a 30 Degree Angle, who commissioned a statue of himself as expression of his megalomania, vanity and illusion of authority.

More recent work captures the lived drama of cities such as Karachi and Lahore, and the disappearance of once flourishing cultural spots, like in “Funland (Karachi Series II)” (2013-14). In the photo and video installation, Abidi turns into an urban archeologist, digging up specific sites in fast-changing Karachi and commemorating their past existence. The spectral scenes capture disappearing locations such as an old library of censored books, a cinema hall from the 1950s and a 1970s amusement park.

Bani Abidi, And They Died Laughing, 2016, watercolour on paper, 8.5 x 11 in. © Bani Abidi. Image courtesy the artist & Experimenter, Kolkata.
Bani Abidi, And They Died Laughing, 2016, watercolour on paper, 8.5 x 11 in. © Bani Abidi. Image courtesy the artist & Experimenter, Kolkata.

For the exhibition at Gropius Bau, Abidi also developed The Lost Procession, a new project commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, where the artist will open a major survey titled “Funland” on 12 October 2019. The Lost Procession draws from contemporary realities of the Hazaras, an ethnic minority of Shiite Muslims in today’s majoritarian Sunni Pakistan, a large number of whom have sought refuge in Germany in the last few years. Abidi collaborated with a Quetta-based photographer, Asef, to capture intimate moments in Hazara homes, to reveal “visual chronicles of loss, resilience and dispossession from a subjective view”. The video traces scenes of daily life, narratives of persecution and forced exodus, and considers how displacement and migration transforms traditions and memorial customs when uprooted from their original context and translocated, leading to the possibility of loss of meaning. As Gropius Bau writes, “In light of her own Shi’a lineage, she grapples with the politics of belonging to a minority community, and attempts to open questions of sectarian violence and terrorism within Muslim countries.”

The current exhibition is titled after a series of watercolour drawings made in 2016, And They Died Laughing, in which Abidi brings together protagonists from everyday life, caught in the midst of hysterical laughter. The work responds to the William Shakespeare’ pun ‘to die laughing’, and refers to how reality is sometimes stranger than fiction, making collectively shared humour a mode of comprehension. Abidi’s characters are set in the context of the dark socio-political realities in Pakistan, and reference people who have been assasinated and abducted for their political views. Here the artist fearlessly defies the reality of enforced silence in a tightly controlled society.

“Bani Abidi: They Died Laughing” is on view from 6 June to 22 September 2019 at Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany.

About ASIA

ASIA | Art Spectacle International Asia is an independent online magazine covering contemporary art from Asia-Pacific to the Middle East.

Founder and Editor C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia is a Vietnamese-Italian from Padova, Italy. She currently resides near Venice, Italy, but she has lived around the world for more than 20 years. London was her home throughout university and her first forays in the art world and gallery work, until she moved to Shanghai in 2006 where she worked for Pearl Lam Galleries (then Contrasts Gallery) until 2009.  She has lived between Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Padova, Italy in 2009-2016, where she worked at Galerie Qyunh, Craig Thomas Gallery and contributed to Art Radar.

Mai holds a BA in Chinese | History of Art and Archaeology and an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, as well as an MSc in Development Studies | Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the School of Development, Innovation and Change (SDIC), University of Bologna, Italy. She has worked in the conservation of world cultural heritage in Rome and in contemporary art galleries in London, Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh City. Her articles have been published in Art Review Asia, Art Radar, The Culture Trip and CoBo Social.

Mai joined the Art Radar team as Copy Editor in May 2013, and became Staff Writer in November of the same year. Continuing to contribute her writing to Art Radar, she took up the role of Managing Editor from November 2015 to December 2018, when Art Radar ceased publication.

To continue on and contribute to the dissemination of contemporary art ideas and practices from Asia, Mai founded ASIA in Spring 2019.

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