LONDON.-Pakistani artist Bani Abidi will display her latest video and photographic works in her first UK solo exhibition entitled Standing Still Standing Still Standing…at Green Cardamom.

Over the past eight years of working with video, Abidi has used her documentary-style aesthetics and short-film format to explore topics that range from the petty nationalisms of the Indian and Pakistani Diaspora, the typical plots of Bollywood films and an attempt by a Lahori band (more accustomed to playing at weddings) to play the American national anthem. Such seemingly diverse topics are in reality a multifaceted look at national identity in a South Asian context. Not as the identity politics of ethnicity and religion but rather the emotional conduits through which political power is often channelled.

For this Green Cardamom exhibition, Abidi examines specifically how political powers can control and shape those people that underpin their regime. Though the works are set in Abidi’s native Pakistan, the passivity gripping oppressed cultures in the face of political dominance carries universal resonance.

Abidi will exhibit two recent works: Reserved, a video produced for the 2006 Singapore Biennial; and The Address, a series of prints and video stills first shown in Karachi in 2007. Both pieces are linked by a series of digital drawings created for this exhibition.

Reserved is a two-channel, 8-minute video installation; it presents several different locations in a hypothetical city where people anticipate the arrival of an anonymous VIP. While one screen follows the motorcade of luxurious, black cars and its police escort, the other moves between multiple scenes showing people waiting. The VIP never arrives and the cycle of waiting loops, seemingly, endlessly.

The Address comprises photographs capturing personal responses to a faux presidential election. Abidi commissioned a trompe-l’oeil painter to create a replica of the set used for the televised presidential address in Pakistan: a blue background curtain, a portrait of the country’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Pakistani flag. She then recorded this replica onto DVD and screened it in various public spaces where the artist then photographed those watching. No figures are ever seen on screen, returning to the theme of mass submission under political authority, regardless of their physical presence.