Love Marriage
2012
Performance by Amin Gulgee and Saba Iqbal
Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture – Karachi
Amin created Love Mariage for Band, Baja, Baarat, a group exhibition curated by gallerist Sameera Raja at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi. Sameera most likely borrowed the title of the exhibition, which translates as “band, music, procession,” from the hit 2010 Hindi Indian rom-com about two rival wedding planners who inevitably marry. Amin’s work subversively upended such tropes. The title was confrontational—a marriage in South Asia is assumed to be an arranged one while the term “love marriage” refers to couples who choose their own partners, sometimes against their families’ wishes. Here the “couple” was played by Amin and fellow sculptor Saba Iqbal whose faces were painted an identical Kabuki white, effacing gender. Amin wore a gleaming copper helmet with a stiff plume atop while Saba was strapped into an aggressive-looking nickel-plated copper bustier with nails protruding from it. Led by a group of musicians playing traditional drums that Amin had hired from a local Sufi shrine, the pair entered the courtyard of the school followed by male and female students dressed in gender-neutral white shalwar kameez, Pakistan’s national attire, who played their joint baarat. Amin and Saba sat together within a metal frame strewn with fairy lights. Before them was a table with two large white bowls upon it, one filled with eggs, the other empty. Using elaborate, stylized gestures, they broke the eggs into each other’s palms, pouring their contents into the barren bowl. Once the two had cracked open all the eggs, the procession gathered around them in a protective circle. Spontaneously, members of the audience came to sit on either side of the two to get their photos taken just as they would at a conventional wedding. Led by the drummers and the baarat, Amin and Saba performed their rukhsati, or formal departing, leaving the courtyard arm in arm.
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