Play Me
2017
National Museum – Karachi

Amin cast parts of his own face in bronze for his performance Play Me, which took place at dusk on the grounds of the National Museum in Karachi. Sitting on steel and copper chairs on either end of a steel table with a brass grid on top, all created by Amin, he and Sara Pagganwala faced off in a game whose rules they made up as they went along. Staring obstinately into one another’s eyes, they slammed duplicates of Amin’s cut-up features upon the board, shouting, “No!” as they aggressively advanced their own set. The antagonism between the two seemed only to build. Children who had gathered in the park to play soon huddled, fascinated by Amin and Sara’s loud sparring. Some, gripping soccer balls, looked on in apparent disbelief as the weighty pieces flew from the table, thudding to the ground. After more than an hour, Sara and Amin rose, gravely shook hands then departed. The work brought to mind Reunion, a 1968 performance by Marcel Duchamp, his wife and John Cage. (Playing on an electronic chessboard, the three created an extemporaneous composition in which each move was reproduced as sound; they continued until the audience got so bored it left.) Amin returned to his performance for Play Me (Duchamp is Dead), in which he and Zarmeene Shah competed over the same chess-like game. The two, laughing maniacally at the absurdity of it all, was included in Outsiders, an exhibition they co-curated with Zeerak Ahmed at the Amin Gulgee Gallery in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in 2018.