Gallery 400 Voices Lecture Series: Bani Abidi

Bani Abidi will present an artist talk as part of Voices lecture series at Gallery 400.

Bani Abidi is a contemporary Pakistani artist who works primarily in video, photography and drawing. Hovering somewhere between truth and fiction, her work is an incisive and ongoing investigation of nationhood, history and political power and bureaucracy in South Asia. Through an exploration of political barriers, forms of social control, and the intersection of Pakistan’s colonial and Islamic history, Abidi documents the mechanisms of power that control everyday lives.

Abidi was born in Karachi, Pakistan and lives and works between Berlin and Karachi. She studied painting and printmaking at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, earning a BFA in 1994. She later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning an MFA in 1999. Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows internationally, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein(Berlin), Experimenter (Kolkata); Dallas Contemporary, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art (Newcastle), Green Cardamon (London), and Gallery TPW TPW Gallery (Toronto). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago , Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, TateModern (London), British Museum (London), and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), among others.

This lecture is supported in part by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies.