Bani Abidi has an extraordinary penchant for leading you to the edge of levity and then thrusting you into a heart-sinking abyss of a cold political reality. It is disorientating to say the least. But that’s what makes her such a restrained, pithily calculated video installation artist.

Her present exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is titled ‘The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared’ and it is sure to resonate with many immigrants from developing countries, where democracy is feigned and anarchy rules the roost. The title refers to the disappearance of journalists, bloggers and activists in Pakistan who have vanished without a trace because of their outspoken views against the establishment.

Strangely enough, Abidi does not employ her most frequently used methodology of artistic inquiry — video or photography — to construct the narrative. Instead, she uses the ephemerality and impulse of watercolor drawings to visually depict the journalists speaking, as if in a moving storyboard.

The light watery strokes of colour lend fragility and tenuousness to the images, as if an accidental water spill will erase these people; not just from the paper they are painted on but from collective memory — a convenient amnesia that occurs often in our history books. She said she listened to their interviews online and sometime later, even the interviews could not be traced.

‘The Distance From Here’ constitutes a video led to by a series of double yellow lines that look like official directions on the floor of the gallery. The video depicts queues of anxious people standing in the sun, sweaty and tired, waiting for their visas. Within those few frames, we detect the desensitising of a people who would be proud husbands and wives, fathers and mothers in their own homes. Poignant depictions of a punitive veracity.

Bani Abidi’s latest exhibition in Chicago is a powerful comment on enforced disappearances

Not many will comprehend the gravity and magnitude of Abidi’s prints of street security barriers. But for people who lived through those dark days after 9/11 and saw the first makeshift barriers go up, especially in Karachi, they became more formalised, to segregate and restrict “dangerous elements of society.” These barriers eventually became tools of economic divisiveness. It was Abidi’s perception of them, not as ubiquitous objects but as harbingers of a larger conflict, that has stood out.

When Abidi lived briefly in Delhi, she created a video of Ram Sutar, an octogenarian sculptor, celebrated for his monumental statues of politicians and national self-proclaimed heroes. At first glance of this video, we know its provenance to be Indian rather than Pakistani, as religion forbids iconography in Pakistan. But all the hubris, the arrogance, the posturing, of the megalomaniac politician and his demeaning attitude towards the humble artisan, is so familiar to the Pakistani politician that in this, borders melt away.

The video traces the fictional account of a politician who is procrastinating about his finest personal representation for posterity. In Abidi’s distinctively acute manner, we come to harbour dislike for the man and his egotistical view of himself.

The sculptor, on the other hand, is unfazed, as if he has seen so many of his ilk that it is of absolutely no consequence to him. We see that his workshop is full of broken pieces of older statues, reminiscent of politicians of a once-honorable repute who now lie in the dust heap of history.

As a Pakistani, there are videos in the exhibition that make one wonder how would the Western community ever be able to grasp the full nuance present in them without deep contextual paradigms? The video, not photograph, of the static screen of the empty chair with Quaid-e-Azam’s portrait on the wall, the Pakistan flag, the blue curtain, the bowl of roses — all waiting for the head of state to make an emergency broadcast, is not an image that anyone in another part of the world would comprehend.

But the curators have done well to add this to the show. It is the duty of art to teach others about the sociopolitical culture of its country. This is what good art takes the time to do. At least a few people will be drawn into the narrative, and they will read into the innuendo and perhaps a delightful sense of comprehension will radiate through them when they learn of the histories of our nation.

If we are to base our premise on Jacques Rancier’s aesthetic regime that all output during and after modernism is the logical outcome of socio-political issues, for no artist works unengaged from their milieu — and if they do, they are indeed false — Bani Abidi settles comfortably into these surreal times we live in.

She is an artist of great control, and employs incongruity and absurdism and then synthesises fact and fiction at a genetic level, confusing viewers into laughing when they know their hearts are aching. It’s not every day we see our emotions manipulated so recklessly and the remains handed back to us neatly tied up in a box.

‘The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared’ is up at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from September 4, 2021 until June 5, 2022

The author is an independent art writer and curator and runs the blog artemesiaartinpakistan.com. She currently lives in Chicago, USA

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 31st, 2021