Description

The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men was first presented in her solo exhibition at MCA (Chicago, 2021). This piece catalogues the gestures and dispositions of various men. Through a subtle exploration of body language and representation, this piece becomes an archive of physical posturing and gesture, traits of men that evoke and represent images of power. These prints explore a kind of charisma, comraderie, and patriotic fervor which we often associate with masculinity and leadership. Using news media as her main source, Abidi identifies specific body language from prominent leaders and heads of state across geographic borders, political parties, and historic eras. The resulting portraits, which are presented here as reproductions of close-up photographs of photographs, capture these virtuosic performances of power, while also indexing their unremarkable commonality.

The work consists of sixty-nine cropped photographs of the hands of various men who use the similar gestures to punctuate their speeches-a closed fist, raised index finger, and open-handed salute. All together, this becomes a corporeal study of power and patriarchy.

Description

Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata 

In this work, Abidi has created an inventory of security barriers across Karachi over the past decade. She documents the global proliferation of an architecture of control and exclusion as seen through the smallest unit. Documented on location through actual photographs and then meticulously redrawn on the computer, this becomes an index of barriers found at checkpoints, airports, embassies, elite housing complexes and diplomatic residences. The work functions as a blueprint for paranoia and militarization in the metropolis, particularly in light of the United States ‘War on Terror’ and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, which directly affected everyday life in many Pakistani cities.

The security barriers reflect the increasing fragmentation and division of civilian society, leading to a localised security infrastructure becoming an extension of geopolitical borders and a divided subcontinent where fear and suspicion reign over a people with a shared history.

Description

Comprised of a video, an installation and a take-away poster, “Section Yellow” addresses bureaucratic rituals and security protocols people face upon travel. Playing on the notion of waiting and navigation required in the immobility of taking upon a journey. A central piece of the body of work titled “Section Yellow” is the film “The Distance from Here,” The film is a single-channel video that is shot between two settings: an outdoor ‘security check’ and an indoor waiting room. What people are waiting for is not immediately clear and the observer waits with the actors until it becomes clear that a visa or travel document is the ultimate prize from the waiting room. The film explores the charged scenography of visa application processes in the Global South, mining the anticipation, collective anxiety and entanglement of personal being and bureaucracy. Multiple frames and gestural narratives follow a group experience along the threshold of legal and illegal belonging. Abidi plays with the disciplinary corpus of immigration infrastructure, particularly around Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad, focusing on the surrounding informal economy populated by photocopy shops, legal notaries and passport photo booths. Choreographing each scene with intimate detail, Abidi reveals the insanity involved in travel for those of us who are relegated to security checks and waiting rooms. 

Description

In this double channel video work, shot in Abidi's quintessential style that hovers between fact and fiction, “Reserved” explores the absurdity of official routine. An entire city comes to a halt in expectation of the arrival of a state dignitary. Projected on adjoining screens, we witness minor rehearsals of state power—children waving paper flags, an auditorium filling up around seats reserved for VIPs and people anxiously awaiting a red carpet arrival—play out on one side, while the spectacle of the motorcade takes place on the other. The title refers to front rows in auditoriums which are always reserved for VIP's. The video however, explores those who are excluded from these spaces of privilege. Included in this work are everyday characters such as policemen managing traffic, a street vendor selling balloons and the state dignitary himself, who is never seen but whose looming presence is always felt in the form of his speeding motorcade. Over time, the reception committee gets more anxious and the people waiting in the street grow more impatient. The traffic jam becomes an allegory for many types of waiting, and the closed streets and heaving metropolis become a source of spectacle and frustration. Waiting becomes a major feature in how we experience power. Drawing upon her own memories of growing up in Karachi, Abidi reveals the universality of the banal, yet life halting senselessness of power. 

Description

Memorial to Lost Words is a mixed-media installation where the only light comes from a table that holds reproductions of archival letters translated from Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu to English. Through folk songs, poetry and this historical archive of letters, Abidi uncovers a hidden chapter of war history where more than a million Indian soldiers served the British military in World War I. Largely erased from collective memory, these soldiers are conjured in the artist’s sound installation through intimate letter exchanges with their families back home, including descriptions of forlorn love, poverty under service to the colonial regime and struggles with death away from the homeland.

Evoking Muharram majlises, with the presentation of a darkened room and melancholic incantations, Abidi asks us to consider memorialization of soldiers who embodied the contradictions that colonial modernity imposed. These sentiments are amplified by a sung poem based on censored letters,(poet Amarjit Chandan and music composed and performed by singer Ali Aftab Saeed) and a restaging of old Punjabi folksongs sung by women a hundred years ago (resung by Ismet, Zainub and Saleema Jawad of Harsakhia). The work serves as an anti- monumental memorial that brings to the fore the forgotten sacrifice of soldiers and their written accounts, which were ignored for so long. 

Description

First developed for an exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation and later expanded in her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this ongoing series of watercolor portraits depicts men in Pakistan who have either been disappeared or are in danger of it. Through portraits of journalists, activists or dissidents, made while listening to their video interviews on-line, this collection reveals the precarities of life under politicized threat and surveillance. This reproduction of the watercolor series reveals the frayed edges for spaces of dissent and the politics of erasure.