Bani Abidi’s body of drawings Attempts at measuring refusal are based on the famous 1936 German architectural manual ‘Bauentwurfslehre’, written by the architect Ernst Neufert (1900-1986). The book known in English as ‘Neufert Architects Data’ is one of the most popular architectural guides of the 20th century, still in print 44 editions and 17 translations later. Ernst Neufert is known as the inventor of the Octametric system, which in the heyday of Modernist imagination established the unit of 12.5 centimeters (1/8th of a meter) as the base unit for all construction. From a bathroom mirror; to a chair in a living room; to the corridor in a home; to the width of the road; to the grid of a city; to the highways that would connect cities as well as the agricultural lands that lay between, everything was designed according to this unit, one thing meant to fit neatly in the other. ‘DIN 4172’ as it was registered in the Deutsches Institut Für Normung (German Institute of Standards)’ was considered to be the epitome of building standardization and industrial efficiency.
Ernst Neufert would later go on to become Albert Speer’s right hand man under the Nazis. And the ‘efficient’ 12.5 centimeter brick would become a primary tool in Hitler’s imperial, expansionist ambitions.

Abidi, who lives in Berlin, draws from a 1951 edition of the Bauentwurfslehre. She subverts and appropriates Neufert’s fastidious drawings of things ranging from animals to food to clothes and cars, in order to think about the relationship between power, measurement and the violence inherent in a society obsessed with rules, logic and order. Alongside, she quietly rejoices and grieves in the company of things unmeasurable, ungraspable, disordered and human, as the only resistance to a dominant order.