If These Walls Could Talk
[The Corona Chronicles]
2020
Curated by Amin Gulgee and Sara Vaqar Pagganwala

In May 2020, as the lockdown in Pakistan due to the spread of the coronavirus was eased, Amin reconnected with a friend from high school who was running the Village Restaurant in the heart of Karachi. in its heyday in the progressive mid-1970s, this eatery specializing in Pakistani barbeque was the place to see and be seen. (In 2002, it also became infamous as the site of the kidnapping of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was later beheaded by terrorists.) Amin and his co-curator Sara Pagganwala felt that the restaurant, silent witness to the city, was a fitting venue for If These Walls Could Talk. The audience remained in their cars and watched over 77 minutes of mute video and film projected upon a wall. The 34 works from 21 countries were also glimpsed by traffic roaring down Sharah-e-Faisal, one of the city’s busiest boulevards. Organized into five sections (Perspective, Conflict, Marking, Loss and Quest), these brief, global visions formed a loose narrative. Pakistani filmmaker Jamil Dehlavi offered a clip from his 1975 movie Towers of Silence, a surrealistic tale of a boy haunted by his mother’s death. Also screened was Sebastián Díaz Morales’ Boy and Plate, in which a boy trudges up a Patagonian hill, battling a relentless wind with a piece of plywood, who then teeters precariously on a cliff’s edge, staring defiantly into the gale, which brings tears to his eyes. Gordon Cheung’s 30 May 2020 Minneapolis (History Glitch) challenged the car-bound spectators, both parked or streaming past, with an image of a burning building slowly disintegrating. The artist had appropriated a news photo of a Minneapolis police station set ablaze after the death of George Floyd for his work. In her video, Heide Hatry, a New York-based artist who grew up in Germany at the peak of the Cold War, attempts to scale a wall, the falls.