Our image belongs to others, to the society in which we live.

(Becoming an Artwork by Boris Groys)

A book on an artist is always an arena of dispute: between the text and the image; between the creation of the maker and the commentary, comment, critique by others; and between the two time spans. Text requires you to pause, concentrate and spend a considerable duration in accessing the content, while the reproduction of an artwork can be viewed quickly – at least in far less time than required for reading a page of 51 line as is the case with Bani Abidi’s monograph: Bani Abidi, The Artist Who.

This remarkably produced volume, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH in 2022, encapsulates the art of one of the most exciting artists of our age. Another distinct feature of the book is that some texts, primarily, dependant on Abidi’s body of work spread over two decades (1999-2019). The writings deal with issues that relate to the artist’s concerns, ideas, strategies and political position, but do not describe, illustrate or replicate work in words.

For example, the sensitive piece of fiction by Adania Shibli: This Sea is Mohammad al-Khatib’s revolves around possible routes/ attempts of a young man of 20 years, from Al-Khalil, who wanted to go to the sea with his friends. The author imagines parallel possibilities to reach the waters through Gaza, and when “he arrives at around 5pm on September 1, 2016… there he is standing before the sea, where he may finally shout out loud: ‘This sea is mine.’”

“As the sea hears Mohammad al-Khatib’s shouts, ‘this sea is mine’, it calls back, ‘you are mine’. And the sea does not let go of Mohammad al-Khatib ever again.” A metaphor for dispossessed Palestinians, and how the struggle to reclaim their land could unfortunately end in their eternal silence and mortal stillness.

It would be interesting to note that Bani Abidi’s exhibition, The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared, was digitally transferred into Ramallah, for three months at the Birzeit University Museum. The show, which ended on February 28, had a relevance to the Palestinian situation. The entire exhibition was transferred “online (including scans of drawings) and reprinted locally to circumvent the tyranny of Israeli Customs.”

One can a group of visitors identifying with the work of Abidi, as the artist questions the presence of power. By depicting a public waiting before the presidential address to the nation, waiting on roads for a minister or any other VIP’s entourage to pass, or standing in the queues for getting passports, visas or for security check. As Vazira Zamindar comments in her thought provoking essay: “In her films, photographs and drawings, she choreographs and composes scene after scene that makes us behold, hold still and observe this strangely familiar condition of which we become a part, until we laugh at its absurdity.”

The show, which ended on February 28, had a relevance to the Palestinian situation. The entire exhibition was transferred “online (including scans of drawings) and got it reprinted locally to circumvent the tyranny of Israeli Customs”.

Laughter as Milan Kundera points out in A Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a means to dismantle the tyranny of the state. Abidi has created a set of eight watercolours on paper And They Died Laughing (2016); with its double edged meaning, since resistance and resilience, no matter if it is in the form of a joke, could prove fatal. Like the protagonist of The Joke, another novel by Kundera, who is persecuted because of a joke he sends to his girlfriend. The inherent potential of humour is elaborated by Sarnath Banerjee (the celebrated author of graphic novels) in his contribution: “when I was asked to write on Pakistani humour, I saw red flags.”

The state cannot tolerate criticism, comments or humour, as Bani Abidi narrates in another 24 watercolours titled: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared (2019), rendering individuals of different ethnicities; Pashtun, Baloch and Mohajir. The series is an ongoing project, since the disappearance is an ongoing phenomenon.

The art of Bani Abidi viewed in a Palestinian city from the central West Bank acquires another dimension and significance, because it consists of security barriers. In her set of 26 inkjet prints Security Barriers A-Z (2008-19), the artist draws various forms of barricades, used for blocking roads, at check points, to safeguard buildings – all serve to keep others away. Installed on the pretext of stopping militant attacks, they have eventually become a device to exclude. In her monograph, reproduction of these barriers precedes Adania Shibli’s text, hence extending their context and relevance.

A security barrier, in its essence, hampers the advance of a traveller. Also, of location and ideas. Adnan Madani, in his brilliant essay The Frame as Borderland: Islam, Allegory and the Distance from Here, investigates the significance, history and the impact of local identity, and the urge to wrench away from it, particularly in reference to Abidi’s video The Distance from Here (2009), of “a group of people assembling to apply for travel visas in a nondescript outdoor space, moving within sharply demarcated lines and being subject to security scans.”

Abidi’s work is a narrative of an imaginary migration, which takes place, repeatedly in the heads of those who are applying for visas and standing in “regimented queues.” It is an artwork that in Madani’s opinion “has to be read in the broad philosophical context of the intercultural encounters of serval hundred years of Islamic globalisation, variously referred to as the culture of the Islamicate or what Shahab Ahmed has called the Balkan-to-Bengal complex. Abidi herself, born in Karachi, educated in Lahore and Chicago, a resident of Delhi and Berlin, is an artist who negotiates her way in and out of multiple cultural contexts.”

Along with a substantial body of images produced by Bani Abidi, the monograph also includes the pictorial essay Karachi is a Body Warm to the Touch and Cold by Abeera Kamran, consisting of images of Karachi’s streets, graffiti, commercial signboards, religious structures, layers of posters, advertisements and city police’s barriers – all that offers the backdrop to Abidi’s aesthetics. In their early years she and her contemporary Huma Mulji were inspired by the Karachi Pop. The monograph provides a three-part conversation between Bani Abidi, Huma Mulji and Omar Kasmani, with reminisces of years spent in Karachi, but expounds to other places, to the imaginary homelands, a state of being at two locations simultaneously. Huma Mulji explains: “Moving changed where I looked at the world from. Even if I saw it with Karachi eyes, the perspective was entirely different.”

The art of Bani Abidi makes us see the world around us through an entirely new perspective, position and perception. Her monograph helps, enormously.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore.