Dish Dhamaka
2002
Amin Gulgee Gallery – Karachi
Curated by Amin Gulgee

Amin took on the mantle of curator at his gallery for the first time with Dish Dhamaka. This was not his first curatorial effort, however. He had curated three iterations of Urban Voices at the Karachi Sheraton in the late 1990s, transforming its main lobby into a pop-up art space. These shows juxtaposed work by established Pakistani artists with that of recent graduates from local art schools. For Dish Dhamaka, or “dish explosion,” he asked 20 sculptors, painters and architects to appropriate a satellite dish and create a work from it. (Syed Munawar Ali saw the dish as a plate proffering a tempting red apple; Abdul Jabbar Gull reimagined it as a beggar’s bowl holding three foreign coins randomly tossed within.) Amin’s curatorial proposition was unusual proposition at a time when Karachi’s art scene was largely comprised of commercial galleries showing painting and drawing. The sculptor was drawn to the satellite dish for two reasons: First, it was three-dimensional, allowing him to curate one of the city’s first shows of large-scale objects. Second, these parabolic antennas proliferated at the turn of the last century, bringing a wide range of mostly Western content into Pakistani homes for the first time. With the advent of cable TV a few short years later, dishes became as quickly obsolete as they had been desirable. The bowl-shaped receivers continued to stubbornly sit upon Karachi’s rooftops, however, pointing to the sky, transforming the silhouette of the city. Amin asked each of the artists to write statements, pondering what these aerials symbolized to them. Some saw them as messengers of information, others as conveyors of dreams, and yet others as a harbinger of obtrusive foreign influence.