Bani Abidi (b. 1971, Karachi, Pakistan) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Bani Abidi works in the mediums of video, photography, and performance, often problematizing grand narratives that center around nationhood and truth.
Abidi’s work at LB01 was created in memory of more than a million Indian soldiers who served in the Great War (1914-1918) but are remembered–if ever–only for their valor and loyalty to the British crown. 70,000 Indian men died in the war and to date have not even made it as a footnote in the Imperial War Museum’s World War I exhibit. Abidi gleans from historical archives of letters and folk songs, in trying to imagine the complex world of longing, loss and displacement as was actually experienced by these young men.
Abidi’s recent exhibitions group include: 8th Berlin Biennial Berlin; Documenta 13, Kassel; No Country: Art from South and South East Asia, Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; The British Museum, London, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka and the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas amongst others. Select solo exhibitions include those at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; An Unforeseen Situation, Vdrome (Online Platform for Film and Video); 2016 Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg;2015 Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; 2014 Kunstverein Arnsberg, Arnsberg; 2012 Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata; 2011 Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle