Bani Abidi

Bani Abidi (born 1971) is a Pakistani artist working with video, photography and drawing. She studied visual art at the National College of Arts in Lahore and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, she was invited for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program, and since then has been residing in Berlin.

Abidi has been working with the moving image for the past two decades. She has consistently blurred the edges between fiction and fact while gleaning from the dark absurdities of everyday life. Her staged scenes and anonymous characters struggle with enacting small gestures of resistance, within broader dynamics of state power and nationalism. Abidi, who also draws and photographs, uses humour in all its gravity and firmly believes in the agency of laughter.