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Bani Abidi on The Gravitas of Absurdity

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It’s quite awful to begin with clichés but I would like to get those out of the way first. Bani Abidi, by virtue of destiny if you may call it so, occupies a rich intellectual space that affords her a rare observer’s viewpoint quite unlike most others who call the South Asian subcontinent their home. She is a Pakistani artist whose home is Karachi, has a husband whose home is Delhi, and has a master’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. Put together, this gives her an excellent position to observe the issues of national, cultural and personal identity, especially in the context of the tensed relations between the subcontinental neighbours as well as the impact of American culture and power on ordinary people, in both the countries. Of course, there must be many people with similar life trajectories as Abidi but she has used it thoughtfully to become one of the most important contemporary Pakistani artists. Her works, mostly videos, brilliantly analyse the situations that ordinary people find themselves in, and she is able to bring out the underlying currents of human behaviour sensitively. At her recent exhibition at Experimenter gallery in Kolkata – a space that has been called by Adeline Ooi, the Art Basel Hong Kong director, as one of the most important contemporary places in Asia – she presented paintings as well as video works that took a profound look at extraordinary situations that get created around ordinary individuals, rendering them charmingly comical if looked at superficially, but when dug deeper, expose several strands of complex collective existence in an aspirational, ordered society. She succeeds in depicting what can be summed up as the gravitas of absurdity. Following are the excerpts of her interview with BLOUIN ARTINFO in the context of the show at Experimenter, titled “The Man Who Clapped For 97 Hours.”Your exhibition, “The Man Who Clapped For 97 Hours” is a take-off from a very interesting mass event of 2014. When and how did you arrive at the point to know that you could build an art show on this event? The work that did take off from the mass events in 2014 was “An Unforeseen Situation,” a video that was commissioned by and shown at Dallas Contemporary in Texas in September 2015. The show at Experimenter [Kolkata] was a development of the ideas that I had started thinking of in the film. Like the text in the beginning of the video indicates, it started with me seeing a photograph in a Pakistani newspaper of thousands of white chairs laid out in some kind of stadium with a caption that read, ‘Seating arrangement for 150,000 people to sing the national anthem.’ My absurdity radar started beeping furiously…and so it began, my research into a Punjab government-funded youth sports festival, which had a whole section of events in which people were being pulled into and encouraged to break world records. To top it off, the festival was riddled with controversies and allegations of corruption.  This display of nationalistic machismo in the context of the perpetually faltering state that is Pakistan, and that too an event full of bribes and scandals, made the whole thing quite brilliant.Did the process of creating this show give you some unexpected insight into human nature, its desires and aspirations?Well, I am really interested in eccentric individuals who (for me) display a peculiar form of agency and creativity that defies thelogic that society or mainstream economy demands of them. The “Ghost of Mohammad Bin Qasim” (2006), “The Speech Writer” (2011), “A Table wide Country” (2013) are all older works with interesting, crazy protagonists. In this case, while I was looking at the Punjab Youth Festival, I came across all these individuals who were also participating in these record-breaking exercises with their own feats. And the person who really stood out was the man who smashed 155 walnuts with his head in one minute. It was a really symbolic performance as far as I was concerned, although for him probably a difficult and painful physical accomplishment. Because of him, I discovered other men in the country and outside who had made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the strangest skills they had clearly spent a lifetime mastering. So, there is the ‘Edward Scissorhands of Lahore,’ a barber who cuts hair with 11 scissors simultaneously; Asghar Bahawalpuri, a B-grade Punjabi movie actor who took off 6 months from his prolific career to make the worlds largest padlock, (Bahawalpur apparently being a city of locksmiths); a man who perfected the art of splitting one hair into eight… men who broke world records for the longest duration of laughs, claps, speeches, screams and head stands. A whole universe of meaningless gestures, which these men strived to get known for… excellent... isn’t it!Broadly speaking, your work is often a comment on the demographic, economic and cultural changes in Karachi in particular and the subcontinent in general. Do you see your own city differently now after having explored it through the prism of an artist with a certain perspective? Did your shift to Berlin change the way you look at Karachi? Being an artist, a writer, filmmaker or an anthropologist (for instance) who is trained to look at ones surroundings in an aesthetic but hopefully also in an analytical way, sets one apart from others for sure.While you are in the business of responding to, trying to understand and decode things, most others are just trying to survive, vulnerable to the machinations of daily life. So, having this position is actually a short cut to coping with the toughness and madness of things. Its nice when its about comprehending and staying on top of something, rather than succumbing and getting washed away.Being in Berlin has given me the distance to look at and think about Karachi, because just like I end up thinking about my son’s kindergarten schedule and baby-sitters, cooking, German bureaucracy and logistics in Berlin, living in Karachi is also about complaining about expensive schools, poor house help, the corruption of government officials, nasty bosses and other such things. One ends up complaining so much about the city one lives in, that you can’t really see anything anymore, you are perpetually reacting…but one way to calm down is to get away. So maybe a flirty relationship with Karachi, which alternates between intensity and lightness, is more productive than a marriage.With reference to your video installation “Funland – Karachi Series II,” do you think that the metropolitan cities of the subcontinent are increasingly getting impersonal in proportion to the growth they are experiencing, that there is more fear pervading the air than before, that people are increasingly becoming lonesome despite the mad crowd around them?I think the most interesting thing is the general cultivation of fear these days and the resultant hatred for the feared object/person. Fear clearly sells better than those stupid Utopic ideas they experimented with earlier. The most deeply celebrated fear, that of terrorism, gives a carte blanche to the state and civil society to target, remove, censor anything they want. So for instance, I remember hearing an extremely odd public announcement in an upper class Delhi market. It was a man’s voice reminding all potential landlords in that neighborhood about how they needed to conduct extensive background checks on their tenants. It was an official endorsement of vigilance and suspicion. The raison d’etre for it probably lay in escalating episodes of burglaries and crime in the neighborhood, but the psychological space that announcement created in its listeners was one of immediate distrust and fear.So I don’t think people are lonesome in our cities, they exist within all kinds of communities but the determiner is the fear industry and the size of cities like Karachi (much bigger than an average, well-nourished Scandinavian country) that has complicated relationships between communities. There are power issues that prevail when things get congested and all kinds of moral, legal and social tropes are freely used to exclude, evict and silence people.As an artist, what are the other aspects of life in an animated city like Karachi that inspire you? Do you have any ideas in mind that you would want to explore through your art next?A dear friend of mine, who is from Berlin and has lived in Lahore for years (and considers it her spiritual and emotional home), said of Berlin the other night over dinner, “Berlin is so boring, I can go to sleep while walking.” It was undoubtedly a harsh assessment of her city, since it is by no definition a boring one. But what it opened up was a conversation about the contrasting natures of public space in cities like Calcutta [Kolkata] or Karachi when compared to most western cities. Public spaces in a city like Calcutta have their own logic and terms of use (as every city should), much like those lovely eccentric men who do things the way they want. The complex arrangement of lives that can be lived, professional activities that can be conducted, food that can be eaten, goods that can be sold, cricket matches that can be played...all within a few hundred metres of a street, has been termed the ‘inclusionary, informal and unregulated usage of public space’ by me, a highly organic and smoothly functioning design solution as far as I am concerned.And this access to public life is only the tip of the iceberg, which provides clues and insights into changes and transformations in the lives of people in the city.As an artist from Pakistan based in the western world, does the gallery ecosystem of the West expect your art to be aligned in a particular way? Do you often have to fight stereotypes? Being a child of the post liberalization global art world, and a beneficiary of it, I am very aware of the pitfalls and problems inherent in it. Yes, there are stereotypes one has to negotiate all the time, and I manage to circumvent issues like gender discrimination or religious fundamentalism, which is the only bit about Pakistan that the liberal community’s hearts are beating for. To be honest, these issues don’t, in any way, deserve to be ignored. But the bigger question at the heart of cultural production today is why must we always speak to an ‘international’ community? It requires such a huge dumbing down of complex ideas and thoughts… this attempt at ‘universalizing’.  It is much more inspiring to converse with an audience with whom one shares history, politics, humor…often language. And people outside of this circle are welcome to join the conversation, but they have to work at it a bit. But at least it ups the ante. The world of independent media on the Internet is so reassuring in that regard, because its super-localized and thorough. If someone really needs to understand something they have to make an effort to access it, its not being served on a cheap, large, good looking platter. This international ‘populism’ in art and literature, which cashes in on existing world worries and ideas is going to kill excellence and originality.Personally, I try to complicate, satirize and evoke a new way of looking at society, at ourselves, I have no one particular political missive.Follow@ARTINFOIndia

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