Bani Abidi was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She moved in Berlin in 2011. Her work was shown at the last Documenta 13th (June 9th – September 16th 2012).
In this part three of our Skype conversation, Bani Abidi talks about how being is Germany is affecting her work. “If an artist gets picked up in one place and put in another, he or she will not respond to that place immediately. It takes a while to internalize and to figure out your own relationship to a city.”
In the past years, she has produced a lot. She did the Documenta film and the photo work for the Experimenter Gallery’s booth at Frieze. But she does not work very fast and she doesn’t like making tons of work.
“I think I have done my work this year and now I am just sort of reading. It is nice not to be working for big exhibitions that set deadlines and I refuse to do anything very big for another year. I need to take a break.”
For the moment she prefers to work for open-ended projects. “It gets very tiring as an artist to work for specific exhibitions”. What she is looking forward at the moment is just looking, observing, and collecting stuff.
Interview by Tiziana Casapietra