Healing II
2020
Amin Gulgee Gallery

At the height of the global lockdown due to the spread of COVID-19, Amin revisited his 2010 performance The Healing. This new work was part of what he came to call The Corona Chronicles, which also included his curatorial projects Lal Jadoo, The Trojan Donkey and If These Walls Could Talk. Healing II occurred on the rooftop of Amin’s home/gallery capped by his largescale mosaic Salaam Gaudi, installed in 2005. There was no audience present; rather, it was made specifically for video and photography and captured in a single take. As in the original performance, Healing II occurred during a time of terrible loss. And as in the first, Amin asked people close to him to help perform it. While Zarmeene Shah stood on a plinth reading a passage she chose from Albert Camus’ The Plague, Adam Fahy-Majeed drew Amin, who was crouched upon a small cart into view. Adam and all other performers—except Amin—wore a perforated copper “plague mask.” Amin brandished long copper fingernails, a spiked helmet of copper and steel and wings of copper, steel and gold leaf. Graffiti artist Sanki King had also marked his face and torso withآMaori-like patterns. Australian-born Adam removed Amin’s helmet and sheared his head with an electric shaver, handing the clumps of hair to Sara Pagganwala, who gathered them in four terra cotta bowls. Amin precariously navigated his pinions up and around a narrow spiral staircase to a terrace above, where, higher still, Muhammad Osama Saeed and Sanki King reclined on the base of a soaring iron and glass sculpture in the shape of an eye. Amin rocked back and forth, allowing his earth-bound wings to caress the wind, a gesture as hopeful as it was sad. In a baptismal gesture, Sanki King poured milk over Amin’s head from a clay vase that he had also brushed with black paint. He then tossed the terra cotta vessel in a long arc to the terrace floor, where it shattered.