Memory Room 305
2022
NJV School – Karachi 

Amin assembled Memory Room 305 for KB22, the third iteration of the Karachi Biennale, curated by Faisal Anwar. This was an immersive installation within a classroom at the Narayan Jagannath Vaidya High School (NJV) in Karachi’s congested downtown. Amin rarely looks back. Yet for KB22 he invited the viewer into the recesses of his own memory through sight, smell, sound and touch. At the center of the room was a colonial-era bed. Amin had removed its mattress and replaced it with mirror. Projected upon it was a looped video of his face covered in turmeric, gasping for air. In an accompanying sound piece, also on loop, he alternately growled, wailed like an infant, or exhaled loudly. On the ceiling above the bed stretched a band of 38 of the artist’s mother’s saris. At one end of the room, steel trays containing turmeric and cayenne pepper jutted from the wall; the smell of the spice in the windowless room stung the nose and eyes. On the opposite wall, Amin had composed a mosaic of objects from his home. It included a black-and-white photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day; a sketch his father made of him as a child. Before it was a Damascene seating arrangement of walnut with mother-of-pearl inlay in Islamic patterns that had always occupied a central place in his parents’ drawing room; next to it was a marble bust of Napoleon that his father had salvaged from a Karachi junkyard. An algorithm randomly selected red, blue and green lights to illuminate the room at intervals of 7, 14 and 27 seconds. The overall effect was disorienting, almost hallucinogenic. The day of KB22’s opening, Moosa Hassan Kamani, a drama teacher at the NJV, performed for over four hours. Covered head to toe in flaking gold leaf, as if in a state of decay, he drifted throughout Memory Room 305, staring at the objects on the wall, or at his own reflection in the mirrored bed. The artist had instructed Moosa to soundlessly approach visitors to the room and gently touch them on the shoulder. He was “my ghost,” said Amin.