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2023, Amin Gulgee, Karachi, Solo Show, Spooky action at a distance

Spooky Action – Art Now

The exhibition and collaborative performance, Spooky Action At A Distance, by Amin Gulgee was curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed was recently held at Canvas

The exhibition and collaborative performance, Spooky Action At A Distance, by Amin Gulgee was curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed was recently held at Canvas Gallery

A set of characteristics runs through Amin Gulgee’s long-spanning, very notable career: expect the unexpected and expect a spectacle. His recent exhibition Spooky Action At A Distance did not fail to meet the audience’s expectations.
One of the benefits of social media, for better or worse, has been the instantaneous dissemination of events, and in this case this writer is fairly sure that anybody reading this will have either seen images or short clips from the opening night of the show. Almost surely this precludes any attempt to closely describe the objects included in the exhibition. Along with this scenario is the fact that Adam Fahy-Majeed’s curatorial essay explaining the concept of spooky action at a distance, in quantum physic is highly explanatory, for one thing, and then, short statements posted on the some of the walls appoint precisely the place wherein lies a particular approach that Gulgee has toward his exhibition space, that is, his ability to be aware of the topographical and architectonic affordances that a site might offer. Gulgee has consistently worked toward the melding of exhibition and memorable images, and is adept at orchestrating the opening and closing moments of that duration of time which can be genuinely called a true experience.

So, it remains for us to take up other aspects of the collaborative performance and go down other avenues opened to our perceptions. One can recall that a venerable lineage is evinced in the artist’s oeuvre; while the Dadaists and Surrealists were out to wreck the sensibilities of their times, the Neo-surrealists were reacting to the bored and ennui generated by capitalism, the deadening effects of television being their prime target. And, begging pardon for the pun, the concept of Happening happens to be a key idea in the philosophical works of Edmund Husserl in which he discusses experiential temporality. Taken in that sense, a Happening is a highly consequential occurrence, one that may even be unique, with its non-repeatability emphasized. As such, Gulgee generally engineers matters so that all that is seen and heard in his exhibitions remains memorable to the greatest extent.

Coming back to Fahy-Majeed’s statement about spooky action being a concept in quantum physics, we are reminded that teleportation does not involve the actual transfer of solids in time and space, but is the simultaneous appearance of a state of affairs at two different points, more a transfer of information than anything else. Apparently, this last is the inspiration that lay behind the creation of a series of helmets to be worn by some of the collaborators of the show. The theory is that the helmets, apart from being physical commemorations, will have retained the performer’s experience and the information might be shared elsewhere in the universe. These helmets, reminiscent of Greek war helmets that would oftimes have a spectacular plume attached on top, in order to terrify an adversary, are modified in different ways, and are decorated with simple modernist structures, manufactured seemingly as antennae. One could imagine, inversely, that in a manner similar to the storyline of the film, Contact(1997), Gulgee may have at some point received the instructions and inspirations from his counterpart in a parallel universe.

Then there is the matter of the Daemonic, which is spoken of as the nexus of the human mind and the body. We are in fact familiar with the lines of investigation that connect the two, theorized as a mental illness that finds its outlet in diseases of the body – psychosomatic illness. Not as dire, but related, is the term ‘visceral’ which we use for art that causes a bodily reaction in the viewer. Keeping to this field of interest, precedence is given to the chemicals that we call neurotransmitters – substances that are crucial for the passage of information between nerve -endings, and which are in one sense the information itself. With this we come full circle to Amin Gulgee’s main endeavor alluded to earlier: the insouciant blurring of borders in order to create a visceral spectacle that is specific to its time and place. There is no question but that ours is an environment in which generally, theatricality is far more accessible as a means of interpretation,, as most will agree. As a corollary, Gulgee is an artist who is adept in his understanding of the ritualistic uses of the four elements, Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. Hiis sculptures epitomize mastery of the forces of nature, and his performances are imbued with palpable vitality.

In a brief telephonic query whether he feels that he has presently had something new to say (or do, for that matter), Gulgee responded, quote unquote “ One is always developing.” This becomes a factual claim, since, as Fahy-Majeed documents in his essay, the artist has, in a divergent idiom, produced a hanging combinatoire composed of clear sheet glass and silver-gray calligraphic shapes. Gulgee has habitually incorporated coloured glass, mainly in the form of broken bottles embedded in metal or concrete, to create masses of baroque efflorescence; an eagle-eyed passer-by may spot the Max Ernst-like outgrowths adorning the rooftop of the Gulgee Gallery. Thus, one may imagine that from somewhere out there, Duchamp’s extraordinary glass and metal work titled The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Admirers, Even could be a source emanating further states of affairs, waiting in the wings, ready to manifest in another epic series of work by this energetic and hugely dynamic maker of wonders, one who remains tireless in his zeal and passion for creating art.

Source:

2023, Amin Gulgee, Karachi, Solo Show, Spooky action at a distance

A QUANTUM EVOLUTION AND REVELATION – The News

This week, You! takes a look at Amin Gulgee’s recent show ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, held recently in Karachi…

 
A QUANTUM EVOLUTION AND REVELATION

 

art

Amin Gulgee is an artist-curator living and working in Karachi. He received a BA in Art History and Economics from Yale University, USA in 1987 and won the Conger B. Goodyear Fine Arts Award for his senior thesis on Moghul Gardens. He works primarily in sculpture, installation and performance. He has done several exhibitions home and abroad. Amin Gulgee has worked extensively with performance, both as a practitioner and a curator.

Amin Gulgee
Amin Gulgee
 

Over the past two decades, he has conceived 35 performance works of his own, including ‘Triangle’, which he presented at the Moghul-era Lahore Fort in March, 2022. He has also curated numerous group exhibitions at his eponymous non-commercial gallery in Karachi and elsewhere and was Chief Curator of the inaugural Karachi Biennale in 2017. In 2019, he curated ‘One Night Stand/Coup d’un soir’ an exhibition of performance art featuring 32 international artists at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Among Amin Gulgee’s many public works are Steps in front of the Pakistan parliament building in Islamabad and Reaching for the Skies at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York. He has received numerous awards, including the President’s Pride of Performance, one of Pakistan’s highest civilian honours.

Recently, Amin Gulgee exhibited his creations (from 7th February to 16th February) at Canvas Gallery in Karachi. The show, called ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, was curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed. The exhibition included iron, copper and bronze sculptures as well as experimental works in glass and silver leaf. Inspired by an imagined pre-history, seven helmets made out of copper and steel were also displayed at the show.

On the day of inauguration, the show was activated by ‘Fairytale 72’, a collaborative performance. 18 participants delved into the artist’s personal mythology through a series of rituals. It was a delight to watch an amalgam of sound and music on the first day of the show.

A QUANTUM EVOLUTION AND REVELATION

 

While commenting on Amin’s work, Adam Fahy-Majeed says, “Amin doesn’t sketch or draw his pieces in advance, he creates them organically as if the entangled photons of all previous artistic experimentation provide the underlying momentum for new inspiration. Moreover, throughout his trajectory, he has been elaborating on different entanglements within his wider web of artistic creation. Every work that he makes is in a constant state of quantum entanglement; sharing information on a level which changes the state of the next work to be produced. That has been an underlying curatorial idea in this exhibition. To emphasise the information which passes from work to work, project to project, strand to strand, thread to thread, form to form. A process of constant, quantum evolution, and revelation.”

The exhibition:

Perforated Scroll
Perforated Scroll
 

In ‘Spooky at a Distance’, we can observe some quantum information manifesting itself in a new state, a new form of expression, in Amin’s ‘Shadow Letters’. It takes the strand of the calligraphic in his oeuvre, the specific thread of a deconstructed line from the Iqra, elaborating it in the form of engraving glass and layering it with silver leaf. It takes the quantum information from moments of algorithmic projection in his multimedia work, ‘Algorithm VII’, and petrifies them within time and space. The usage of a seemingly flat surface to establish a multi-dimensional play of light, shadow and metal, is entangled with the ‘Perforated Scroll’, which again punctuates space with an assemblage of the seven deconstructed constituents appropriated from the Iqra, in the Naskh script. This is then given further expression on the vertical plane by ‘Ascension’.

The ‘Non-binary Cube’ shares the quantum information of scale in Amin’s artistic praxis, observable in ‘The Iron Horn’. Although, it ostensibly seems not to be calligraphic, given its geometric form, it is a further addition to the thread of Square Kufic script with the invocation ‘Alhamdullilah’. It is a perfectly asymmetrical cube – in that it is totally cubic in its occupation of space, yet absolutely distinct in the view from each of its sides, due to the internal mechanics of its elaboration. In ‘Spooky at a Distance’, it acts as a strangely cardiovascular centre, pumping its energy around the exhibition.

Non-binary Cube
Non-binary Cube
 

Amin’s ‘Entangled Tower’ is a work that is neither wholly new nor old, and that exists in multiple locations at the same time, all enmeshed into a unified object. It is the quantum entanglement of two pieces, two threads – hands and self-portraiture of the face. Through their deconstruction, and subsequent re-assemblage as a singular whole, they are teleporting their most fundamental information through time and space; thus forming its present, unified state.

It is important to note that the quantum realm is underpinned by the idea of superposition; that particles exist in multiple states at once. When an experiment is performed, it is as if the particles only then select one of the states in the superposition. That is how, in Amin Gulgee’s quantum realm, this thread of the Iqra can also take an arachnidan form, as seen in ‘Spider’.

Iron Horn
Iron Horn
 

Even though it shares this aspect of quantum information with other works weaved along this thread, its Tolkeinian presence in space seems to visually share more with a new creation, ‘The Iron Horn’. This organic form lies in a liminal zone, somewhere between a cornucopia, and a fossil from some distant, prehistoric past; or perhaps a relic from an imagined world of fantasy – much like the calligraphic arachnid.

These are experiments that must be performed by Amin, for the constituent particles to select the state they will assume in the process. Therein lies an intrinsic connection between his sculpture and experiments in performance art.

Source: The News Magazine

2023, Karachi, Solo Show, Spooky action at a distance, Year

EXHIBITION: GULGEE’S PHANTASMAGORICAL WONDERLAND – Nageen Shaikh – Dawn News

The Iron Horn (2023)

Held at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi, Amin Gulgee’s latest presentation was called ‘Spooky Action At A Distance’. Let’s first start there.

The phrase is translated from the German phrase spukhafte Fernwirkungen and was first spoken by the physicist Albert Einstein, who developed highly influential theories of relativity and quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. Relativity deals with the presence and absence of gravity and its effects on matter, time and nature. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, aims to understand the nature of matter and the behaviour of particles at the atomic and subatomic levels.

Details of the Entangled Tower
Details of the Entangled Tower

So much about the quantum world is left to be understood, especially about the effect of atoms on each other when they are separated by distance. Einstein doubted that distanced atoms can affect each other in their behaviours — a type of a “quantum entanglement” — labelling the phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.”

Building upon Irish physicist John Bell’s works, scientists have recently tried to show that quantum entanglement may exist after all between molecules and living beings. This is like believing that an occasion taking place in one part of the world has the power to affect another unrelated incident. Spooky, after all!

In his latest exhibition, Amin Gulgee paid homage to the strange and wonderful, both in his displayed works and in a collaborative performance piece

At this point, you might be wondering, what has all this science and mystery got to do with art? Gulgee’s recent stunning exhibition takes its title from Einstein’s phrase, showcasing symbolic works in copper and steel that relate to and inspire each other (metaphorically), as if in a quantum entanglement.

Ascension (2018)
Ascension (2018)

Preceded with dreamlike performances conducted by Gulgee along with 17 other artists at the opening, Gulgee’s works extend to many interpretations that are entwined with multiple dimensions of himself and his realities.

Gulgee’s art practice encompasses over 30 years of manipulating metals. Copper (his central material of choice), iron, bronze (an alloy of copper and tin), steel and silver leaf meet numerous processes like cutting, moulding, welding, gold- and silver-plating amongst others, resulting in aesthetic works that bring attention to their materials and methods.

Legionnaire (2022)
Legionnaire (2022)

Gulgee holds a BA in economics and art history from Yale University. His early career was characterised by individualistic fashion pieces modelled in metals and alloys, sculptural self-portraits and mystical masks. In the 2000’s, the artist fully transitioned towards making large-scale metal sculptures that invoked Quranic verses through organic forms, geometric constructions, and deconstructed self-portraits.

Entangled Tower (2023)
Entangled Tower (2023)

The works have been exhibited abroad extensively to critical acclaim. Gulgee was the chief curator for the Karachi Biennale 2017 and is deeply invested in performance art. Each artwork and performance by the artist is another part in his highly individualistic artistic arc, a whole that continues to be affected by its fragments.

Gulgee manipulates scale, as spectators found in the massive The Iron Horn (2023) in the first room of the gallery, the form inspired by a water buffalo’s horn. There is a quality of phantasmagoria attached to the seashell-like form. It brings mythical objects to my curious mind, such as the conch of the Hindu deity Vishnu from ancient South Asian epic literatures.

If you have watched cult films or explored art and literature that deal with mystical figures or ancestral art-making in native collective societies, you might just hear a shamanistic ringing and beating drums in your ears while you view the helmets titled The Ram, The Legionnaire and The Oracle (2022) in the same room. Such is the thrill of Gulgee’s stout objects, magnified exponentially through the artist’s hands and the textures, forms, colours and the brilliance of copper.

Non binary Cube (2022)
Non binary Cube (2022)

The larger and central space in the gallery is dedicated to works that are meditations on Quranic verses in Arabic, specifically the ones from Surah al-Alaq [The Clot]. The fifth verse of the Surah that translates as, “taught man that which he knew not”, has been reflected upon and assembled repeatedly in Gulgee’s sculptures throughout the years.

At this point, the verse is absorbed within his work so much that the Arabic is recognisable sometimes as letters and other times as words, but still wholly illegible, as seen in the sculptures Spider Raga (2012), Ascension (2018), and Shadow Letters I, II and III (2023). The sculptures radiate a deep and sensational je ne sais quoi [I do not know what] quality, motivating one to read sacred texts, post viewing.

While talking to me, Gulgee passionately reveals that “chopping up” his sculpted portraits is therapeutic and now integral to his lived experiences and self-expressions. Entangled Tower (2023) plays with Gulgee’s signature visual vocabulary. Here, forms of his hands and dissected self-portrait are assembled vertically. A most rigorous and marvellous feat from his studio-workshop processes, artisanal assistance and material handling, the work is best viewed patiently and up close.

After a careful on-going deliberation with his works and concepts over the years, I have come to believe that Gulgee’s works are the epitome of self-awareness. Through this exhibition, whether he connects with you spiritually, invokes a passion for science, or brings out the latent artist in you, among other sentiments, Amin Gulgee gives you the ultimate lesson to find and recognise “yourself”.

Curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed, ‘Spooky Action At A Distance’ was displayed at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from February 7-16, 2023. The opening showcased a piece of performance art by Amin Gulgee and 17 participating artists

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 26th, 2023
Author: Nageen Shaikh

Source: Dawn

2023, Amin Gulgee, Karachi, Solo Show, Spooky action at a distance

Exploring quantum entanglement through works of art – Peerzada Salman – Dawn News

KARACHI: As one of Pakistan’s eminent sculptors, Amin Gulgee needs no introduction. His work done in metal is marked by a combination of his personal outlook on life and a concern for the world that functions outside the realm of creativity. But over the last decade or so, he has also found a distinct place for himself in performance art in which he seldom performs alone; it’s a group act which signifies the importance that the artist attaches to a confluence, rather than divergence, of ideas

An exhibition of his artworks titled Spooky Action at a Distance at the Canvas Art Gallery had an opening earlier this month which had the Gulgee stamp all over it. Instead of simply inviting the guests to see the exhibits that he’s put on display, he, a little before dusk, did a performance piece naming it Fairytale 72.

No fewer than 18 artists took part in it. As is expected of such an endeavour, the arrival of masked and unmasked individuals, a few shouting at the top of their lungs, immediately captured the attention of viewers that had packed the gallery space like sardines. With the element of fire used discreetly, the ‘spookiness’ in the whole exercise was evident not as something to scare away the onlookers but as an essential part of modern-day existence.

Explaining the concept, the write-up that came along with the invite to the show says, “Albert Einstein dismissed quantum entanglement — the ability of separated objects to share a state or condition — as ‘spooky action at a distance’. These ideas were vindicated, however, in the most recent Nobel Prize for Physics, in which the scientists who have proven the existence of quantum entanglement were rewarded for their contributions to our understanding of that which underpins the most fundamental movements of the world around us.

“Gulgee continuously explores quantum entanglement through the objects he makes. Ideas and threads develop and metamorphose, profoundly affecting one another in the web of his practice. Curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed, Spooky Action at a Distance includes sculptures in iron, copper and bronze as well as experiments in glass and silver leaf. Seven helmets created out of copper and steel inspired by an imagined prehistory are also on view,” it stated.

As can be gauged from the above-given lines, art and science aren’t deemed as polar opposites here. They are mutually reinforcing. Just like the collaborative efforts that Gulgee believes in.

The exhibition will conclude on Thursday (today).

Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2023

Source: Dawn.com

7, Karachi, Solo Show

7

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7

by Ammara Jabbar

Following the slippery contours of alphabets, craning and unfurling, they become visual orators of a fractal monologue. Pinning and pulling them together to find that they have become a residue; cohesive in their elated state of ambivalence. Roaring with slippery symmetry, alphabets parading without a guise of a word; rampant and unabashed; a vexing tale crafted in copper and zest. An opera seized in a moment of time, the alphabets poised like

acrobats, held hostage to a state of steady symphony.

Amin Gulgee, a name that ushers with it a monolithic flair. A reigning magician in his own right, he has foraged

through the the decades of art and fashioned a risque space that

Dynamic Featured Image

resides unhinged on the brittle facade of yesteryear.

Like a pandemonium collected in momentary relief, the air around him ripples with brazen clamor. Frilled with opulence and unabashed gusto, Amin Gulgee is a powerhouse strung with operatic flair and robust whimsy.

A recently concluded show at the Amin Gulgee Gallery titled ‘7’ was an ensemble of the artist’s recent work. The show flippantly stands on a tepid binary of the personal and the public. Rooted in the fifth verse of the 96th Chapter of the Holy Quran (“The Clot”) translated as “taught man which he did not know” is the jugular of Gulgee’s sculptures. The intial verses of this chapter were the first to be revealed to Prophet Muhammad p.b.u.h; it is an auspicious moment that celebrates knowledge and man’s humility.

Gulgee asserts that his personal relationship with the line, almost an obsessive one, has manifested into a profound state of incoherence over the years, yet the testament to the origins stay with him. Deconstructed and reconfigured over the years, resigned into a visual exercise. A constant reiteration; condensed into a latent state of recluse. An intrinsically personal endeavor into a spiritual state of cognizance. While inconspicuous, the language merely functions as a cryptic code; a momentary relief for the content that has been dissected into a state of prudent introversion.

The verse has been broken into seven parts; reconfigured and arranged into spatial entities. Alphabets poised atop one another in demure grace, an earthen offspring of a manic pursuit. Through his musings the viewer negotiates with the private and public binary within the manifestation of the work.

Gulgee also laid out a carpet of coal with alphabets strewn with steady tact. He asserts the coal as an earthen element, elected for the sake of it’s humble virtue. The work itself, laid out in grandeur, is a sanctimonious gesture towards the profound state of simply being. Gulgee’s work has a primal quality; a quivering virtue guised in subtle poetics.

This exhibition is set to travel to Rome later this year, Gulgee muses about the work being set in a moment of time, as it becomes a nomad traveling to foreign lands it will resign to a different moment in time.

Like an ancient breath stringing beads along a febrile thread, the clink of the beads against one another as they are strung together, slipping into a state of continuity..the works assume a tranquil quality of being held together by an imagined reality; resting in consort, a state of harmony and salient equilibrium. Braving through the winds and vagaries of time it shifts with each witness.

Gulgee also invited the viewers to leave notes in bottles which would later be destroyed; this engagement allowed for the personal to be confronted within the diction of his work; the curtains left open for a still moment, the viewer becomes a bearer of secret knowledge that is revealed only to be destroyed without it being heard.

The secret stolen moments and the symphony of the acrobatic alphabets made for a transcendental experience. As words become alphabets, the content becomes a insurgent witness to a sacred quest, the folly of man-made languages set against the profound state of experiencing sans conditioning..thought in it’s elemental state, incommunicable, but elongated through the breadth of it’s pursuit.

To conclude in Zarmeene’s words “This moment of the personal is at the core of this body of work – where the origin, the idea, the process, and the manifestation, all are internalized, absorbed within the self to once again be iterated anew (it is only when that which we know is forgotten, can we then begin to learn once again). This then is at the heart of Gulgee’s practice: a search for the unknown through acts of remembering and forgetting, constructing and deconstructing, fracturing, rupturing and reconfiguring, again and again: repetition, difference, différance.”1

Source: artnowpakistan.com

7, Karachi, Solo Show

EXHIBITION: THE CALM AND THE TUMULTUOUS

Two artworks from the show, welded and cast in copper and bronze
Two artworks from the show, welded and cast in copper and bronze

Amin Gulgee’s new sculptural formations, standing tall in his gallery like totem poles or guardians, seem to carry many secrets of time and history. Pieces of copper/cast copper and bronze, in the shape of letters in the traditional Arabic script balance gracefully, one on top of the other, in what seems like an effortless dance. The work titled ‘7’, shown recently in a preview in Karachi, travels to Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, in a solo show this year. It’s curated by Paolo De Grandis and Claudio Crescentini and co-curated by Carlotta Scarpa.

Amin’s work is situated within the paradox of his times. While he has referenced the Chahar Bagh, or the four-part Mughal garden, in his work since the ’90s, here there is an unavoidable disruption of the traditional Islamic garden. His aesthetics also embraces the subtlety of the Persian, Urdu and Arabic scripts and there is a harmonious continuity of lines, which becomes the form. In this exhibition, the circular Nastaliq script emerges as a delicate nuance, a veil and a formation of lines like the rhythm of a musical note barely audible.

We are left to complete the work, to wonder at the word and the object that intervene in a rhythm of repetition. These repeated letters, such as the ‘Alif’, ‘Noon’ etc, present new possibilities of interpreting Amin’s sensibility. The incoherence of the words, disjointed from the original phrase, keep the viewer at a distance. It is as if the artist intended to extract the essence of the word, as he departs on a solo flight. He may also be negotiating the ‘sacred’ within, with an insistence on creating personal spaces that defy containment.

In his latest work, artist Amin Gulgee deals with the paradox of light and dark, disruption and embellishment, in moments of rapture and solitude

Repeated within a grid, the negative spaces invoke the movement of light and vision, to look beyond the frame, in seeing what is not apparently visible. What we really seem to have before us is Amin’s garden. A manifestation of the Islamic Chahar Bagh, there is a chadar of coal spread on the floor. Is this a negative space or a shadow of the grids? It is in gestures such as these that Amin exposes himself, without ego or self-censorship. He deals with the paradox of light and dark, disruption and embellishment, in moments of rapture and solitude.

In the Mughal garden, the Cheeni Khana is a water channel which runs over a wall of diyaas (lamps) lit in the niches appearing like a sheet of light. This chadar is reflected as a source of purity and an attempt at recreating the gardens of Paradise. In the essay ‘Rethinking the Islamic Garden’ Attilio Petruccioli describes the carpet of Khosrow 1 as “depicting a garden with streams and paths, with stones as bright as crystal depicting the illusion of water, the ground worked in gold, to look like earth.”

“The Persian garden,” Petruccioli says, “looked for an order, in a means of drawing earth and cosmos together.”

In Amin’s garden, reflection is transformed in meanings closer to the artist’s lived experience. Embellishment is not opulent but in a raw form. This garden is bare and minimal. The coal is dark, and penetrates many layers of terrain — the psychological and the social — with possibilities of renewed transformation.

In a prior performance, the Chahar Bagh was left to burn in a public space and in other performative happenings; Amin’s curatorial voice came through the jarring discord of up to 50 artists that he gathered in the enclosed gallery. Amin’s narrative exists between the calm and the tumultuous and the open and free.

“7” was held at the Amin Gulgee Gallery in Karachi from March 30 to April 7, 2018

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 29th, 2018

Amra Ali  – April 29, 2018

Source: dawn.com

7, Karachi, Solo Show

The power of 7

This week, You! talks to renowned artist, Amin Gulgee, regarding his latest art installation in Karachi…

exhibition

This week, You! talks to renowned artist, Amin Gulgee, regarding his latest art installation in Karachi…

A few artists have their names associated with ingenuity and originality in Pakistan and the world over. Only some of them have understood that art can’t be imitated and it is something which completely relies on an artist’s pure imaginations and ideology. One such name in the world of art is of Amin Gulgee. Armed with a Bachelor of Art in Economics and Art History from the prestigious Yale University, USA, Amin Gulgee began his career as an artist in 1990 from his native city of Karachi. Using this ancient land and its rich, diverse history as his muse, his creations synergise Hindu mythology, Buddhist asceticism and Islamic calligraphy to explore the underlying spirituality of man.

Amin Gulgee’s latest installation in Karachi, titled ‘7’, was recently on display at Amin Gulgee Gallery, Clifton, Karachi, and will shortly depart the city heading to the Eternal City, Rome, for the Galleria d’Arte Moderna [GAM], where the work will be curated by Paolo de Grandis and Claudio Crescentini.

Scrolls of large metal structures; this larger than life installation consists of the fifth verse of al-Alaq in the Quran divided into seven pieces. Gulgee often scripts this verse from the 96th chapter of the Holy Quran on his artwork. Surah al-Alaq (‘The Clot’, also referred to as ‘al-Iqra’) is believed to be the first revelation sent to the Prophet Muhammad in the cave Hira, in the city of Mecca. The fifth verse is where we are told that God “Taught man that which he did not know.”

Having constructed and deconstructed it so many times in the past decade, it has now become internalised and Gulgee embodies it through ‘7’, where the sentence is itself divided into seven portions and these seven sections are repeated several times, and hence the name of the exhibit.

While talking to this scribe, Gulgee talked about his recent activities from curating last year’s ‘Karachi Biennele’ and now to be showcasing his work in Rome, representing Pakistan at this prestigious global art solo show.

“It’s wonderful to be in my workshop, back in my day job. Also, I am absolutely thrilled to be going to Rome. It is a city that has always a special place in my heart. I studied art history and my fascination was with the Roman Renaissance,” shared Amin Gulgee.

“The whole point of this show is that the text is not readable, although the content comes from a special source for me, I am going beyond content,” described Gulgee, for whom, all pieces of art in the show are one installation.

The artist has internalised the words, and he allows the pieces to do the same, free-flowing, delving into the heart of the verse itself; as according to an official essay by Zarmeene Shah that accompanies the immersive experience of the exhibition, “The power and possibility within that which is not known.”

“For ‘7’, I have divided the verse into seven sections and the words are repeated throughout the exhibition,” told Gulgee. “You cannot read the text, so the pieces are like my private messages and private love letters.”

This romantic sentiment is carried through to the entrance, where glass bottles are displayed with notepaper and an invitation to write a private message and place it in a bottle, which you bring inside and becomes a part of the exhibition. At the end of the exhibition, Gulgee would burn the bottles and destroy the messages so they will remain private.

“This is a performance element to the exhibition,” explains the artist. “These bottles full of private love messages were my way of engaging everyone in the installation as their words and thoughts literally become part of the organic ‘7’.”

This deliberate inclusion is one of the many charms to this well-thought out show.

“There is also an algorithm that’s projected onto a screen in the installation where these seven parts to the phrase appear randomly till the screen goes white, then they become black, then white, and each time a letter appears, one tone of the rubab is heard,” explained Gulgee.

When asked why the verse was divided into seven pieces, the artist replied, “It was an intuitive choice. I love numbers. I love all numbers, because this is so private to me, I don’t even like the source to be discussed. I have claimed the sentence to be mine and it is very private to me. So, the show in a way is about privacy to me, in a world where everything is exposed.”

According to Shah’s essay, the number seven has several religious connotations, such as the biblical reference to God completing the creation of the Earth in seven days and in Islam, the Quran refers several times to the presence of seven heavens, the (Quran 71:15), and to the seven gates of hell (Quran 15:44), and during Hajj, the pilgrims walk around the Holy Kaaba seven times, as well as walk between the Mounts Safa and Marwa seven times, and even seven pebbles are thrown at each of the three pillars that represent the Devil during the ritual at Mina.

Gulgee also felt it was important that seven was a primary number. “A primary number, as such, is in a circle that connects us back to the idea of singularity, it remains indivisible, except only by itself (one),” elaborated Gulgee.

While one’s eye is drawn to the depth of the metal, the curves of the sculpture, the hidden love message and the messages in a bottle, the magic really happens beneath it all, from the depth of the vision and the soul of the artist.

By T.U. Dawood – April 17, 2018

Source: thenews.com.pk