Bani Abidi They Died Laughing

n the curatorial text for Bani Abidi’s exhibition, “They Died Laughing,” at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the Karachi- and Berlinbased artist is described as an “urban archaeologist.” Abidi’s videos, photographs, and works on paper take the everyday lives of cities as source material, spinning intricate, anecdotal webs around her ordinary protagonists. The Berlin show surveys the past 20 years of Abidi’s oeuvre, which explores how humorous