A record for our times

Few things compel us to laugh at ourselves. Bani Abidi’s art falls squarely into that set. For example, in 2003, she ran a small experiment. She asked a brass pipe band in Lahore, Pakistan, to learn the American national anthem. The resulting video was funny and thought-provoking. It seemed to say: We on the subcontinent often emulate the West blindly; the results are often mixed.

Abidi’s second solo show in Kolkata pokes good-natured fun too. Watercolour works like the titular Man Who Clapped For 97 Hours call attention to our fascination with breaking some very strange records in South Asia.

“There was indeed a man who clapped for some ridiculously long period, and set a world record by doing so,” says Abidi in an email conversation. “Most of the 10 drawings (in the show)—The Man Who Could Split A Hair, The Man Who Yawned Continuously For 5 Weeks and The Man Who Gave A 60 Hour Long Speech—draw from real characters who broke world records.”

The show, which comprises two video installations and 10 watercolour paintings, is being held across two venues. Funland (Karachi Series II), a video about the aspiration of a Karachi or a New Delhi to become a cosmopolitan city on the one hand and the forces (including censorship) that hold them back on the other, is being shown at the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata. The Experimenter gallery, where Abidi showed her work in 2012 at an exhibition titled Then It Was Moulded Anew, is hosting the rest of the exhibition.

“Bani is an important artist, not just in South Asia but globally,” says Priyanka Raja, who runs Experimenter with her husband, Prateek. “Bani is incredibly rooted to her city (of origin). Her art is witty and her political humour is current,” Raja adds. Abidi’s works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London.

Indeed, Abidi finds inspiration for her works in Karachi, the city where she was born, and in the nitty-gritty of the everyday. In Karachi Series I, for example, Abidi showed the city at dusk, in the month of Ramzan. The video wasn’t a simple documentation, but a reimagining of the city.

“Karachi, like a lot of other South Asian cities, is full of fantastic, unregulated and spontaneous narratives,” Abidi explains. “Things don’t happen the way they should; for instance, sidewalks (in the few instances where they are present) are not for walking, they’re full of hawkers, stray dogs, dhabas (roadside eateries) and potholes. So there is a particular way in which individuals assert themselves in the minuscule outdoor areas that are available to them just because it’s a space, regardless of what it’s meant for. So you see all kinds of wonderful things, like the other night it was Eid-e-Milad Nabi in Karachi, and I was driving around, enjoying the heavily illuminated city, when I saw a bunch of 20 Pathan men on a side street randomly doing a traditional Pathan dance, in this very slow, circular manner. And every 2 minutes, they would be partially lit by the headlights of a car driving by. It was surreal,” she recounts.

Trained at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Abidi now lives in Berlin. The difficulty of shooting in Karachi now is also part of the reason why Abidi’s latest show has more paintings than videos.

“I started off as a painter and printmaker years ago, but moved on to video fairly early. Now, because of purely logistical reasons I have gone back to painting. I am a bit fatigued with relying on shooting videos once or twice a year when I come back to Karachi and would prefer to make art more frequently. So now I draw on my dining table in Berlin. The watercolours in the show are portraits of men, the kind that get portrayed in the video,” Abidi says.

Why doesn’t she make videos around, and about, Berlin?

“Berlin is a different world, a great city to live in but not a city I can read or understand like I do my own,” she says. “And I prefer a mole-like approach to working, where you dig deeper and deeper, rather than skim surfaces and get nowhere,” Abidi adds.

The Man Who Clapped for 97 Hours is on till 27 February, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at the Experimenter gallery, 2/1, Hindusthan Road, Dover Terrace, Ballygunge, Kolkata (033-40012289). For details, visit www.experimenter.in.

Funland (Karachi Series II) is on till 28 January, noon-6pm (closed on weekends and public holidays), at the Government College of Art and Craft, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Kolkata.