Experimenter presents The Song, a solo show by contemporary artist Bani Abidi. The exhibition marks the artist’s third solo at Experimenter, premiering a new film along with photographs, watercolors and an immersive sound installation.
The Song brings together Bani’s long-standing interest in using aural experiences to build textures of urban landscapes and the people who inhabit them. The work is built on a scaffolding that reveals Abidi’s nuanced thoughts on identity and statelessness, waiting, longing and fragility. Much of Abidi’s work grapples with the modern history of South Asia in order to address concerns of nationalism, colonial legacy, foreign intervention, forced migration, political ambition, megalomania and personal memory. Abidi’s sensitive approach to these contemporary realities affirms the need for a complex understanding in a moment of increasingly simplistic conceptions of belonging and in creating a counter-narrative to a widening polarisation of truth, memory and political reality.