Riwhyti: One Night Stand An Evening of Performance Art
2014
Karachi
Curated by Amin Gulgee

Riwhyti: One Night Stand was the first exhibition of group performance in Pakistan. (The Urdu word in the title means tradition; its juxtaposition with the English phrase was suggestive.) Curator Amin invited 26 visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, actors, and architects to simultaneously perform 19 works over a period of two hours. The public was invited to walk throughout his gallery and its courtyards and watch the live performances in no particular order. In Syed Ammad Tahir’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, the artist enacted a piece that allowed the public to peer into the privacy of his bedroom. Audience members took turns sitting on benches to watch him dance before a mirror as he adorned himself with makeup, a wig, jewelry and stilettos. Danish Raza’s Sacrifice and Surrogates was a sly take on Pakistani democracy, or periodical lack of. Carrying a cardboard box, he led a goat, a Pakistani flag tied around its neck, through the bustling gallery handing onlookers a slip of paper that asked: Should we sacrifice the goat or not? The audience was asked to tick a box and then cast their “vote.” Filmmaker Madiha Aijaz (1981-2019) and actor Nimra Bucha performed the interactive, narrative piece Swimming Pool. Madiha, wearing a floppy hat and sunglasses, sat behind Nimra, who, sporting a swimming cap and goggles, lounged on a beach chair, gesturing to audience members to sit down in the empty chaise longue next to hers and put on a pair of headphones. Madiha then switched on a story she wrote and narrated about a swimming instructor who marries into a religious family who insist she abandon her passion for swimming. As the story was told, Nimra slowly covered herself in an abaya. The crowd, which numbered in the hundreds by the end of the evening, was at once perturbed, amused, baffled and intrigued.