The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 28 Memorial to Lost Words (installation view, ‘Bani Abidi – Funland’, 2019, Sharjah Art Foundation) 2016–18 / Image courtesy: Sharjah Art Foundation (opposite) Memorial to Lost Words (installation view, ‘I wish to let you fall out of my hands’, 2018, Experimenter, Kolkata) 2016–18 / Image courtesy: Experimenter, Kolkata Some day we must die, sooner or later, and if I die here, who will remember me? Gurmukhi, Brighton Hospital, 18 January 1915 1 Bani Abidi employs a unique approach to form in each of her works, which are individually crafted to their subjects. They elicit pertinent and contentious issues that inform identities in South Asia, as well as ideas that resonate more broadly. Throughout a wideranging career spanning more than two decades, Abidi has been able to continually shift from satire and finding absurdity in the everyday to projects subtly nuanced with poetry and reflection, to works that can be overtly confronting. Be it a watercolour portrait executed with a light touch, or a film that captures an urban landscape or parodies political figures and public events, her works harness humour and rhetoric in the banality of daily ritual and the curiosities of history. For many years, Abidi’s works have focused on the contemporary conditions of Pakistan and its immediate region — in particular, issues of security; the idiosyncrasies of democracy; the peculiarities of urban and social change; and the instrumentalised patriotisms that underlie the relationship between Pakistan and India. As she has lived, travelled and practised in different parts of South Asia and the world, Abidi’s experiences have informed a sensitivity to how cultures and peoples are perceived and treated in global contexts. Her work has also focused on negotiating culture and belonging and explored memory and imbalances in the telling of histories. Through prose and song, Memorial to Lost Words 2016–18 pays homage to the memory of more than a million Indian soldiers who served in World War One — including some 70 000 who died — whose accounts have been largely left out of history or mentioned only in terms of their loyalty to the British Crown. An immersive sound installation was produced by Abidi combining two different texts accompanied by the distinctive instrumentation of harmonium and dhol (double-sided drum). A melancholic rendition of an old Punjabi folksong sung by women around the time of World War One is voiced by folk singers with a lamentation that transcends the need for translation. This transitions into the singing of a poem by Punjabi poet, author and activist Amarjit Chandan based on censored letters written by soldiers during the war. Accompanying the soundscape is an installation drawing on letters documented in the book Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (1999) by David Omissi. For APT10, a new version of Abidi’s work presents selected letters on delicate sheets of paper, exhibited flat on tables so they appear as museum objects lying dormant like tombstones. The texts, written to friends and family members from the war front, express the sadness, fear and curiosity of the soldiers’ experiences, as well as longings for home and poetic reflections on death, providing a rarely represented perspective on the events. While books, films and museums around the world glorify World War One, the experience of the Allied forces has long been told from the viewpoint of white English-speaking male soldiers. Accounts of the diversity of soldiers drawn from the British Empire’s colonies who played a significant part in the war are rarely told. Memorial to Lost Words not only seeks to address these hierarchies of history but also paint a picture of personal experiences of war: anguish, sadness, longing and the confusion of a foreign purpose in a distant place. However, Abidi’s portrayal is imbued with a specific cultural nuance, as the language and song return us to a distinct location, culture and era. In this way, the artist seeks a different lens through which to view the accepted, stereotypical account of this historical event. Her work conjures the emotive impact such events had on homes far away from the frontline, acknowledging the sadness and anxiety of having a friend or family member serving someone else’s war in another place, and the memory and loss that have been carried silently through time. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 , Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999. Bani Abidi Born 1971, Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Karachi