FRIEZE LONDON 2024

‘I need to write break up letters to all those friends who quietly looked the other way. And in them I will list all the poems that I can no longer share with them,’ she said to me on the first day of Spring this year. (A conversation in Berlin, 16.4.2024)

In the body of work Fragments from a nightmare being presented at Frieze London, Bani Abidi reflects on the tremendous social ruptures as well as new forms of radical collectivity, that have mushroomed around her since the start of the most recent iteration of the longstanding Israel/Palestine conflict. As a resident of Berlin, a city with the largestPalestinian diaspora in Europe, she has drawn, knitted, cooked and written incessantly for the past ten months, while witnessing the police brutality, censorship and criminalising of anti-genocide voices around her.

In a set of photographic self portraits inspired by Bruno Munari’s 1944 poster ‘Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair’, Abidi choreographs herself seated awkwardly in mid-century German designer chairs, wryly commenting on all the bodies Germany has trouble accommodating. In another set of drawings, titled ‘Trembling hands’, she considers the discomfort of truth-telling in these times of eerie silence and aquiescence. She draws from video recordings of public figures, filmmakers, writers, lawyers, students and humanitarian workers who have spoken out in public forums against the genocide and pleaded for empathy in the face of cold opposition, often breaking down and trembling as they have done so.

The works in the show serve as a register of the moment when truth died a silent death across the metropoles of the Empire.