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Karachi |
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Green Cardamom and VM Gallery, Karachi, 3rd March 2010 to 17th March 2010 |
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Bani Abidi is among the leading figures from a generation of Pakistani artists who trained during the 1990s and began exploring social contradictions through their artistic practice. Green Cardamom and VM Gallery, present three key works by Abidi at this exhibition – her first in Karachi since 2006. Karachi Series 1 (2009), a photographic project that is an investigation into, and a lament of sorts, for the loss of Pakistan’s diverse cultural character in the face of the Islamisation of the nation’s society that began in the 1980s. Work from this project was shown for the first time at the recent Xth Lyon Biennale. The second work, Intercommunication Devices (2009), is a set of digital drawings, where Abidi uses the idea of assembling a visual archive to explore exclusionary spaces, or what Itty Abraham refers to as ‘Security aesthetics.’ Intercommunication Devices explores the meeting point or threshold where power and privilege meets the disempowered and excluded. This work follows closely on from her much-acclaimed Security Barriers A-L, recently acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and another example of the artist’s engagement with exclusionary architecture and spatial controls. The third work is the acclaimed video Reserved, where the artist references the all- too-familiar VIP motorcades in Pakistan’s cities to investigate ideas of power and servility. Reserved is also in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Jerry Fernandez, 7:45pm, 21st August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi, 2009, Inkjet Print on Hahnemuhle Paper 50.8 x 76.2 cm
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