Lal Jadoo (Red Magic)
[The Corona Chronicles]
2020
Curated by Amin Gulgee and Sara Vaqar Pagganwala

Amin Gulgee and Sara Pagganwala co-curated LAL JADOO/RED MAGIC as part of the Second International Public Art Festival in Karachi. An overview of Pakistani performance both past and present, the exhibition included 43 live works as well as 22 works recorded in photographs or video. This two-hour happening took place at Karachi House, a semi-abandoned office building on I.I. Chundrigar Road, Karachi’s Wall Street. The property appealed to Amin because, as he wrote in the accompanying digital catalogue, “[it] is a surreal space straight out of a David Lynch film.” Performances materialized on the sidewalk before the time-worn construction, as well as in its cavernous driveway, shadowy stairwell, stalled elevator and maze of forlorn rooms and hallways on the third floor. Included was Salima Hashmi’s 1972 video Taal Matol – Handa Hubalna (How to Boil an Egg) from the seminal PTV sketch comedy program Such Gup, which used satire as a form of critique. In this skit, Salima played a high society housewife who explains in English-accented Urdu how to boil an egg. Also on view was a 120 x 78-inch inkjet vinyl print capturing Ayesha Jatoi’s 2006 performance, Clothesline, in which the artist made her way around a fighter plane from the 1971 war installed on a roundabout in Lahore, draping it with blood-red cloth like laundry set out to dry. In a narrow alcove upstairs, a fashionably dressed Marium M. Habib alternately ripped wallpaper off the walls or stuck her head in an oven for Critical Domesticity. Noreen Ali sat on the stairs cooing to a dead chicken cradled in her arms. Zayed Malik, wearing a black hood and a hangman’s noose around his neck, wandered phantom-like throughout the building. On March 14th, the day before the show was scheduled to open, all public events were cancelled due to the spread of COVID-19. Amin and Sara agreed that LAL JADOO/RED MAGIC should be closed to the public and viewed on live feed instead.