In 1944, the Italian designer Bruno Munari designed a centerspread for the architecture and design magazine ‘Domus’ which was titled ‘Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair’. It consisted of a series of photographs in which Munari is trying to sit in an awkwardly large armchair, assuming a series of ludicrous positions in his search for the most comfortable one. “Twentieth century armchairs full of corners, physiological armchairs in which people who move get lost, armchairs in chrome tubes, wood, elephant’s teeth,”—his, was a satirising of the modernist impulse for innovation, material and design over simple, familiar comfort.

Abidi’s set of photographs titled ‘Seeking comfort in a German chair’ is inspired by this exercise of bringing together a body and a piece of furniture. Her photographs however are orchestrated in the light of the recent rise of right-wing politics and Islamophobia in Germany, her country of residence. Like Munari, she makes comic attempts in trying to seek comfort in various chairs. Only that the chairs in these photographs have a different connotation: they are chairs by designers associated in varying degrees with the Nazis: Egon Eiermann, Walter Knoll, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ernst Moeckl.

In addition to the topical nature of the gesture, the photographs also raise questions about early 20th-century architecture and design and its relationship with eugenics. What happens when we realise that everything our bodies engage with, and everything we consider to be the epitome of beauty, was designed for the idealised Vitruvian Man? Industrialised standardisation, a hallmark of the German Bauhaus movement, had a clear overlap with the moment when certain races and behaviours were being privileged over others across the colonies.

For the past many years, Abidi has made drawings based on videos. ‘The man who talked until he disappeared (2019-2021)’ was her first series of watercolours and drawings of human rights activists, journalists and bloggers who have posed a threat to the militarised Pakistani State in recent times. She started drawing serialised portraits of these people, while watching their interviews and testimonies online. These sets of conceptual drawings of multiple video frames became commemorative documents of resistance and persistence in the face of state oppression. In the past ten months, ever since the latest iteration of the long- standing and bloody Israel/ Palestine conflict, Abidi has collected videos of people who have dared to speak truth to power on public platforms. ‘Trembling hands’ is a suite of shuddering, shaking portraits of filmmakers, journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and doctors who have broken down, stuttered, or trembled while appealing for an end to the genocide in Gaza.

Born in 1971, Karachi, Pakistan, and now working between Berlin and Karachi, Bani Abidi uses video and photography to comment upon politics and culture, often through humorous and absurd vignettes.