Abacus – Calculate – 2005
180 min
Canvas Gallery – Karachi
Amin Gulgee’s performance Calculate was his first to take place in a gallery rather than on the catwalk. It was also the first—and only—time he showed his oil paintings. The performance, and paintings, were integrated into his solo exhibition of sculpture and installation, Other Works, at Canvas Gallery in Karachi, which featured dolls’ heads cast in bronze, many of which appeared pocked, torn or burnt. The exhibit, which opened soon after the American invasion of Iraq, seemed to capture the foreboding climate of the times. The heads Amin cast were from toys he had discovered at Disposal House, a dusty, cluttered store of bric-a-brac in Saddar, a colonial-era Karachi bazaar. He wished the viewer to be disoriented, even alarmed, by the show, which had an apocalyptic feel. In the driveway, a coughing rickshaw whose body he had refashioned in copper drove back and forth, spitting fumes. Inside the gallery, a discordant sound piece the artist had asked Mehdi Rizvi to compose played at full volume as lights blindingly flashed. Amid this cacophonous chaos, the sculptor Seema Nusrat, who had just finished art school, systematically flung the found dolls’ heads across a seven-foot, horizontal abacus with five rungs that Amin had fashioned out of steel. Stylist Tariq Amin had painted her face in exaggerated makeup so that she, too, resembled a macabre plaything. Positioned behind Seema was a large, curved board painted in dark gray. Stenciled upon in it in silverleaf letters from a font borrowed from Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily, was the word “Calculate,” suggesting a timely headline. As Seema tossed the dolls’ heads back and forth with increasing abandon, some shattered as they hit their mark, an unexpected yet disturbingly inevitable consequence of her actions.