Fairy Tale 72 – Spooky Action at a Distance
7th February 2023
Performance
Canvas Gallery – Karachi

Rather than a curated exhibition of simultaneous performance such as The Q Rickshaw Project or Jagah Hai, Fairytale 72 was what Amin calls “a collaborative performance.” Other examples include This Is Not Your El Dorado in Paris in 2021 and Kiss of the Spider Woman in Chicago in 2022. For these, Amin asks a multidisciplinary group to perform a work that he has conceived, usually, but not always, involving objects that he has made. Sometimes he takes part in these performances; sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes they occur within a display of his sculptures and installations; other times they don’t. Amin presented Fairytale 72 on the opening of his solo exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance, curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed on February 7, 2023 at Canvas Gallery in Karachi. For this collaborative work, he asked 17 others to enter another dimension with him for about an hour. (Fairytale 72 began at the characteristically imprecise hour of 6:43 pm.) Safeer Jaffrey and Umaina Khan, both wearing masks that they had borrowed from shelves on the gallery’s walls, performed with Amin’s monumental sculpture, The Iron Horn. Sitting on top of it, Umaina, a painter, sang a line from a song in Saraiki that she had written: “Oh, I am looking for you.” Safeer, a musician, moved around the horn, leaning against it, responding with another line from the song: “I am walking in the city alone.” Actor Shaikh Faizan Chawla sat shirtless on a stool in a narrow alcove of the gallery. Wearing a helmet called The Ram, he wrapped his arms around his legs, seeming to retreat into himself. Her face covered in a copper shroud, Maha Minhaj confronted male spectators, shouting at them in Urdu: “Who are you?”; “Where do you come from?”; “What are you doing here?” The alarmed men often tried to explain their presence at the exhibition. In Pakistan, where most public spaces are male-dominated, this was her way of challenging their presence. Through their collaboration, Amin and his fellow performers created a story that had personal resonances for all those involved. Amin likens the process to his object making. His sculptures organically assemble themselves, he states, as do all his collaborative performances.