One Night Stand/Coup d’un soir
2019
Paris
Curated by Amin Gulgee

One Night Stand / Coup d’un soir was Amin Gulgee’s first curatorial effort outside of Pakistan. The result of his two-month residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, it was a presentation of 32 simultaneous performances that included other artists in residence at the Cité as well as colleagues of Amin based in Paris and elsewhere. Including music, video, dance, drawing and installation, the happening played out over two hours in the Cité’s front courtyard, reception area, stairwell, basement corridor and auditorium. Although he later documented the evening with a 200-page catalogue in both English and French, Amin intentionally provided no guidance, either written or oral, to the audience, who had to make their way, unprepared, throughout the non-white cube, cramped with performing bodies. Wearing a futuristic costume of scrap metal and plastic, Congolese artist Précy Numbi moved robotically inside and outside the Cité for his work Kimbalambala. The title in Lingala to refer to cars no longer fit for the road in Europe that are dumped onto the market in Africa, where they are retooled as public and private transport. Pakistani painter Amber Arifeen knelt upon a carpet of reproduced posters from 1950s French-owned Algeria. The public notices, which depicted a lone woman with her face uncovered among a group of others wearing the niqab, declared: “N’êtes-vous pas donc jolie? Dévoilez-vous!”— Aren’t you not now pretty? Unveil yourselves!” Amber, wearing a hijab, knelt upon the posters like a punished schoolgirl and repeatedly wrote “devoilez” [sic], alluding to a 2010 French law banning women from having their faces covered in public. English performance and video artist Stephen Sheehan stood on a ledge facing the entrance of the Cité and continuously urinated inside his jeans for We Are Giants Standing on Mountains. The work, which was performed three years after the British people voted to leave the European Union, appeared to depict illusions of invincibility: The “mountain” he stood upon was no more than a foot high.