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Project Overview

If the past is a foreign country, the future is an equally strange, uncertain land. Exiled from a place of memory, people often try their best to recreate it in the present, to keep the anxiety of the future at bay. The desire is especially profound for the refugee or asylum seeker who has been violently uprooted from their homeland and has lost everything they held dear or kept near. In Bani Abidi’s video, The Song, an elderly man of middle Eastern appearance arrives at what seems to be his officially designated new abode. He sets down his solitary suitcase, opens a welcome pack of German food (which he will later replace with items he likes rather more) and unlocks the door to his balcony. Air and street noise come rushing in – as do recollections of equivalent moments in the world he has left behind. We watch as he plays with the lid of a whistling kettle, as if tuning this unfamiliar contraption, and look on as he experimentally opens and closes windows, adjusting the acoustics of airflow, as if pressing or releasing the valves of a building-sized musical instrument. Days pass, with repeated trips to the world outside, and repeated climbs back up the stairs to the apartment, with sundry purchases (an electric toothbrush, plastic bottles, a whisk) that he fashions into makeshift kinetic objects (prepared by the artist, Rie Nakajima).  Their low-key, repetitive sounds echo those from other rooms he has known (the whirr of an overhead fan, perhaps, or the hum of a generator). Symbols of comfort and consolation, this growing family of objects surround him like the resonant appendages of a one-man-band and cheerfully offer the back-up rhythm and accompaniment that allow him to give voice to his own unique, highly personal song.

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Read text by Kamila Shamsie

Project details

The Song

Gallery Oldham

23 March 2024 - 1 June 2024

The Song

TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Austria

25 October 2023 - 21 January 2024

The Song

Kunst Meran Merano Arte, Italy

17 June 2023 - 24 September 2023

The Song

John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

11 February 2023 - 6 May 2023

The Song

Experimenter, Kolkata, India

3 November 2022 - 30 December 2022

The Song

Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

15 October 2022 - 4 December 2022

The Song

Salzburger Kunstverein

14 October 2022 - 10 October 2024

The Song

Videoart at Midnight, Berlin

15 September 2023 - 16 September 2023

The Song

BAW Garten, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

16 September 2023 - 10 October 2024

The Song

Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York

9 November 2023 - 12 November 2023

The Song

Zilberman Gallery, Berlin

15 December 2023 - 15 December 2023

The Song

Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria BC, Canada

25 October 2023 - 10 October 2024

The Song

Dharamshala International Film Festival, India

6 November 2023 - 10 October 2024

The Song

Karama HRFF 14th Edition: Special Edition - Gaza - Palestine

5 December 2023 - 12 December 2023

The Song

22nd River to River Florence Indian Film Festival

9 December 2022 - 10 October 2024

More information

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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Press

Vogue India | 12 new art shows in India to add to your December 2022 calendar

13 December 2022
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The Telegraph India | Contrasting stories of identity

21 January 2023
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The Londonist | The Top Exhibitions To See In London: February 2023

1 February 2023
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ArtReview | Bani Abidi’s Kinetic Sounds of Displacement

13 July 2023
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