Bani Abidi's 'The Song' Explores Displacement Through Sound

Bani Abidi's newly commissioned film 'The Song' (2022) at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton presents a haunting portrait of forced migration through kinetic sounds. The 22-minute film features a grey-bearded elderly man in a sparsely furnished Berlin apartment, using makeshift domestic instruments to create an orchestra. Objects like kettles, plastic bags, and cookie-cutters become instruments, devised by London-based artist Rie Nakajima, evoking Peter Fischli and David Weiss's 'The Way Things Go' (1987). The exhibition also includes 'Memorial to Lost Words' (2016), a glass-topped table with 24 translations of letters from Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army during WWI, accompanied by folksongs of women left behind. Together, the works address loss, memory, and displacement. The show runs from 11 February to 6 May.