Love Letters
2018
Rome

Love Letters was an instructional work repeated three times. It was part of Amin’s installation, 7 and 7.7, co-curated by Paolo De Grandis and Claudio Crescentini, which travelled from Wei-Ling Contemporary in Kuala Lumpur to the Amin Gulgee Gallery in Karachi and then on to Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM) and Mattatoio, both in Rome. For this interactive performance, the artist provided empty bottles and a postcard-size note that read: “Kindly write a declaration of love to a person, place or thing (past, present or future) on a piece of paper, roll it up and place it in one of the bottles. Take your bottle inside the gallery and place it against any one of its walls. These messages, which are to remain strictly private, will be destroyed at the end of the show.” Amin had deconstructed a line from the Quran that has particular resonance for him for the itinerant show. He has used the words repeatedly in his sculpture. At first, they were readable, but over time they have been dissected to the point of illegibility. Here the verse was broken into seven fragments—hence the title 7. Through this process of repetition and deconstruction, Amin has not only internalized the words’ message, but reinforced the privacy of his attachment to it. These works became his private love letters. By asking viewers to write their own epistles and place them around his installation, he wished to confirm his belief in the privacy of love. Amin also wanted to draw attention to the specter of surveillance that prevails in our electronic age. At GAM, Claudio greeted the exhibition’s arrival with a curatorial intervention: Roman poets took turns reciting declarations of love into a microphone. Amin cannot understand Italian. Their intent, however, was not lost on him, or anyone else in attendance.