Bani Abidi’s three-screen video work, Reserved, that similarly turns seemingly straightforward documentation into black comedy. One screen shows crowds standing by a road that has been blocked to let a VIP pass. As the long minutes tick by, one senses the people giving up their anxiety to resume their journey. Instead they settle into a wait, even developing small relationships with their neighbours on the road, borrowing cigarettes or stealing a smile. On a second screen, we see petty officials waiting for a VIP outside an auditorium, glancing at their watches, self-importantly speaking into cellphones, pacing up and down, while an audience fills the seats inside, carefully avoiding the seats marked ‘reserved: As these two videos play on two walls, a third video comes on intermittently, in which the anonymous VIP flashes past in his convoy.

Abidi is an astute people-watcher. Her carefully constructed video not only alienates us from the unseen leader, but suggests how desperately he needs his security cordon – we can guess that he is unpopular and holds on to a brittle power. The officials who wait for him are annoyingly pompous, something that is reinforced by the camera’s low-angle view of them. In contrast the common people halted on the road have humour, acceptance and fortitude; their little gestures of friendship suggest the ways in which shared adversity might create community. This laconic video points to one of the secrets of South Asia’s survival through all its turmoil.