Bani Abidi (B.1971) Flailing Barriers ink-jet print on paper laid on aluminium dibond each 42 x 59.4 cm (16 9/16 x 23 3/8 inches) Executed in 2015; from an edition of three; six prints on paper Footnotes: Provenance Experimenter, Kolkata, 2016; Christies, South Asian Modern & Contemporary Art, 11th June 2019, lot 77. Property from a private collection, UK; Acquired from the above. Exhibition Karachi, Gandhara Art Space, ...The most amount of people standing still, screaming & laughing, 14 July - 8 August, 2016 (another from the edition exhibited) 'I want to make a strong point about the fact that my work is not about Pakistan. It's about power, security, and militarised architecture; and it's about the vulnerability of regular people.' - Bani Abidi. Abidi is one of South Asia's most incisive contemporary artists, known for her sharp, often humorous engagement with questions of nationalism, bureaucracy, identity, and the aesthetics of power. Working across video, photography, and installation, Abidi examines the ways in which ordinary citizens navigate systems of state control, surveillance, and urban anxiety. Abidi studied painting at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, graduating in 1994, and later pursued an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Her training in both Pakistan and the United States gave her a dual perspective, rooted in local realities yet informed by global discourses of contemporary art. Over the past two decades, her works have been exhibited widely in international museums and biennales, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and documenta 13 (Kassel). Her practice, marked by a subtle interplay of irony and empathy, often blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary, politics and poetics. At the heart of Abidi's work lies an interest in how symbols of authority shape collective behaviour and emotion. Her ongoing exploration of urban infrastructure and its psychological impact finds powerful expression in her Security Barriers series (2008-2009), of which Flailing Barriers is a key work. In Flailing Barriers, six security barriers, those ubiquitous concrete blocks and metal contraptions that have become fixtures in the post-9/11 urban landscapes of South Asia, are depicted in a state of animated disarray. The barriers appear to be dissolving, collapsing, or perhaps dancing, stripped of their rigidity and purpose. What once functioned as instruments of control and separation now seem to flail helplessly, their forms melting into absurdity. Abidi's treatment of the barriers transforms them from oppressive objects into symbols of futility. Rendered with lightness and irony, the work suggests a world where the mechanisms of state power lose their coherence, and where the visual language of fear, gates, fences and blockades begins to unravel. The dissolving forms evoke both humour and unease: humour in the absurd spectacle of failed control, and unease in the recognition of how deeply such objects have infiltrated our visual and emotional landscape. Through Flailing Barriers, Abidi reclaims the aesthetic potential of objects that typically embody intimidation. The title itself 'flailing', implies struggle and collapse, evoking the fragility of systems that seek permanence through obstruction. By anthropomorphizing the barriers, she exposes the performative nature of security, the way it operates as theatre, as much about display and illusion as about actual protection. As part of her broader Security Barriers series, which includes photographs, drawings, and sculptural representations of real barriers found in Pakistani cities, Flailing Barriers reveals Abidi's interest in the intersection of art, politics, and urban form. It is not only a critique of militarization and bureaucratic absurdity but also a meditation on resilience, the persistence of life, humour, and imagination within constrained spaces. Abidi's work consistently challenges viewers to reconsider the banal artefacts of power that shape their daily realities. In Flailing Barriers, she turns the architecture of control into a site of vulnerability and satire, reminding us that even the most rigid structures can, eventually, come undone. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing