Pakistani video artist Bani Abidi plays a chicken-and-eggplant game.
She says this is Bengali. That’s completely spoiled my exotic Persian appeal.” We’re standing around offering help and hindrance to Bani Abidi, artist and Pakistani living in India, as she makes the eggplant-and-curd dish which drew the comment in question. The kitchen is no wider than a millionaire’s double bed, so we have to step around a bit as we chat about Obama’s promise and Sarah Palin’s looks.
Exotic appeal gone, but exotic apparel present. Abidi’s wearing T-shirt and jeans, both from a trip to Brazil, where her husband, graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, did some work for a São Paulo art biennale. Completing Abidi’s ensemble is a bright red apron, on which she’s carefully wiping the oily fried brinjal slices.
Abidi is a media artist, specialising in video and computer art. Recently she became the first South Asian artist living in South Asia to be purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Her work can also be seen at the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi.
For Abidi and Banerjee, every day’s a working day, he at his drawing board and she at her laptop. But Abidi makes sure to give Sundays the respect they deserve — such as by going out to watch a movie.
Watching films is what started her off on video. Studying at the School of Art Institute of Chicago during the 1990s, she often went to watch foreign films showing nearby. “I switched to doing video because I was interested in the narrativity of video, concepts rather than objects,” she says.
After a satisfying lunch, Abidi shows us her work. One 2006 video called Reserved, filmed by her in her hometown, Karachi, is viewed on two screens. One shows a VIP motorcade speeding along deserted streets, and the other shows citizens preparing to receive the August visitor. There’s no dialogue, but different scenes show schoolchildren lined up along the roadside, prosperous-looking people taking their seats, a reception committee kicking its heels, and so on. Nobody ever arrives. “We’re watching people wait, we’re part of the torture of it,” says Abidi.
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“I have become very interested in how the state exerts its power over people,” she says, displaying a series of computer prints which illustrate an astonishing variety of street security barriers in Karachi — metal, concrete, painted. After years of consuming largely anodyne, self-referential Indian art, the wry political-ness of Abidi’s work feeds a hunger I scarcely knew I possessed.
FAVOURITE RECIPES
CHICKEN CLIFTON
1 kg chicken chopped small
5 medium-size tomatoes
1 tsp garlic
1-inch ginger finely sliced
1 fistful of coriander leaves
6 green chillies in thin slices
1/2 tsp dhania powder
1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp red chilli powder
Salt to taste
Heat oil, add a spoon of garlic. As it turns light brown, throw in chicken pieces and fry for five minutes. Add tomatoes, dhania, cumin powder, salt and red pepper, and let it simmer on low heat in covered pot. Once chicken is fully cooked and tomato gravy reduced to a thickish paste, sprinkle ginger and green chilli on top and let it cook for another two minutes. Take off stove, sprinkle with chopped coriander and serve.
EGGPLANT BORHANI
1 big eggplant
2 cup yoghurt
Cumin seeds
Dry whole red pepper
5 cloves garlic
Salt to taste
Cut eggplant into very thin slices. Salt, and let slices sit for five minutes, so that water is released. Heat oil and deep-fry eggplant slices till dark brown. Meanwhile, whip yoghurt and a little water in a serving bowl, then add crushed garlic, salt and pepper. Immerse fried eggplants in yoghurt mixture. Fry cumin seeds and dry red pepper in hot oil and pour it sizzling over the dish.