Thick Yellow Lines

Her husband,graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee,is busy at his drawing board,while we sip coffee and watch Abidi’s latest video work that is fresh off the editing table. The video and a set of accompanying photographs will be displayed at Project 88 in Mumbai this September — her first solo in India in two years. It will travel to Italy in November,under the aegis of the Green Cardamom gallery in London that represents her.

Abidi’s Yellow Lines captures a day at an immigration office. “The clerk plays an important role,” she says,“He is a metaphor for the jargon used by bureaucracy and the power it has over people.” In the video,a clerk sets up his table with a typewriter,stamp pads and standard office stationery. There are guards with sensor machines who are ready to frisk you. There is a funny moment when a man pins a row of gaudy ties with easy elastic bands to a photo booth. The tie is meant for men applying for visas,to bestow on them a formal air,but in this instance it becomes more of a comic device. That all of this is happening in an open field makes the video both surreal and satirical.

People wait with their documents,records of citizenship. Under a hot sun,they stand in orderly queues marked out by thick yellow lines. Each person wears a different expression: one is bored,another is tense,the third is harrowed. Some others look smug and superior. “These people are not travelling for leisure. They just want to visit their family or go to work or college,” says Abidi,who has often had to wait in line for her visa in Islamabad.

It is only towards the end of the 13-minute video that you realise it is not a documentary,but a staged film. “I invariably make faux documentaries to capture the quotidian details of life that need to be taken to a philosophical and abstract level. The idea is not to create drama but to evoke a gentle critique. I am not an activist but an artist,so that is an important distinction,” says Abidi.

While the video is layered and could hold multiple meanings for those who tune in,it does try one’s patience,and the viewer may easily get bored by the everydayness in the work and skim over any deeper message.

Abidi’s 2006 work Reserved also dealt with the concept of waiting. The series of photographs captured an entire city waiting for a VIP to drive by in a motorcade. “Officials in south Asia display a particular kind of power. There is a strong sense of hierarchy and class in this part of the world,which also comes from the fact that we are the third world straining to measure up to and be approved by the first world,” says Abidi.

She studied painting at the National College of Arts,Lahore,in 1994. Then she did her MFA at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. “I was not stimulated to do much work in the US because I did not relate to the social milieu there and felt like an outsider,” says Abidi. For the past seven years,she has chosen photography and video art as her mediums. “I do paint but I prefer video art because it offers me the freedom to recreate the documentary. I get a lot of inspiration from films,but not so much from other video artists,” she says.

Her first video work Mango captured two women eating a mango — one was Pakistani and the other Indian. The idea behind the work was to illustrate that the two are not that different. “When I began making video art in the late 1990s I was mainly exploring my identity as a Muslim woman. But I have moved on.” To satire,painted in yellow.