John Hansard Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition by Bani Abidi, including a new film work that draws on Abidi’s interest in sound and migration and what it means to be displaced.
The Song follows the fictional story of an elderly man who has recently arrived in a new and unfamiliar European city. He confronts the isolation of his new apartment by creating his own soundscapes to recreate what is familiar and reassuring. The film poignantly highlights the realities of homesickness, yearning and loss. In so doing, Abidi enables a complex spell of identity to emerge, where we glimpse an intimate portrait that moves between sanity and madness, tragedy and comedy, rootedness and rootlessness.
In addition, John Hansard Gallery will also be showing Abidi’s sound installation piece, Memorial to Lost Words (2016), Memorial to Lost Words remembers ordinary civilians and soldiers, rather than the generals and rulers celebrated by architects such as Edwin Lutyens and historians who continually re-tell the histories of the Great War. This installation also exposes the lingering imperial legacies of literature, like Rudyard Kiping’s Kim and the Zam-Zammah, and how museum collections, like people, were partitioned between post-colonial India and Pakistan.
The Song is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Contemporary Art Society, John Hansard Gallery and Salzburger Kunstverein. Supported by Arts Council England. Presented by Contemporary Art Society to Gallery Oldham.
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