Dreamscape
2014

Together with Zarmeene Shah, Amin curated Dreamscape in December 2014. Including 48 artists, it was an exhibition of performance unfolding within a series of site-specific installations. As in Riwhyti: One Night Stand, the performances were executed together the night of the opening. In her curatorial essay, Zarmeene referenced a quote by Yoko Ono: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality.” Sunil Shanker and Kashif Hussain, both actors from the National Academy of Performing Arts, climbed ropes suspended from the ceiling, their mouths shut with tape in an apparently Sisyphean struggle against censorship. Omer Wasim stencilled words in chalk in several places on the gallery floor. As was his intention, these fraught, private declarations were destroyed by the shuffling feet of curious viewers who thronged to the gallery to watch the spectacle. Unwittingly, the crowd had completed the work through this “performative” act. In a response to sectarian killings convulsing the region, Muhammad Ali and Manizhe Ali, black tears painted on their cheeks, sat as likenesses of the Mona Lisa in voluminous black skirts before a wall of 1300 red roses knitted by Muhammad Ali over a period of a year. In Things that Happen in Bed # 1, Shalalae Jamil lay on a mattress on a landing of the gallery as a film she shot as a graduate student in Chicago was projected onto the ceiling above her. Positioned next to her was an A4-size piece of paper that proposed: “You are invited to watch a six-minute minute film with the artist in a bed. Please limit your exchange to a greeting and a good-bye.” The work, like the show itself, challenged the relationship between the private and public, the asleep and the awake, the solitary and the collective.