Abbas works in many different media, inventing, intriguing, and critical, ways to comment on conventional ideas. In Paper Plates (2008), her target is the ‘skewed dynamics of cultural consumption’. Thin strips of paper have been printed with the phrase, ‘Please get served’, endlessly repeated. Discs of paper collage were made by combining the strips in complex geometrical patterns, which are recognisably Islamic. The discs were then hot-pressed into paper plates, a part of everyday life in every continent. The plates, though, are full of holes and cannot be used to ‘get served’. Tim Stanley
