The Irritable Heart
2022
Frere Hall

Amin performed The Irritable Heart with the painter Nazia Ejaz, daughter of the legendary Pakistani singer Noor Jehan (1926-2000), for Zenana-Mardana (Feminine-Masculine), a group show organized by Pomme Amina Afzal at Karachi’s Frere Hall in February 2022. The title of the work refers to a heart condition characterized by breathlessness, palpitation, weakness and exhaustion that is sometimes suffered by soldiers. Before the live performance, Amin and Nazia had recorded both their voices and layered them over the beating of a human heart, which first pounded rhythmically then sporadically. The night of the opening, as their sound piece played, Amin and Nazia, dressed in black kurta pajama, a gender-free outfit, solemnly walked into Frere Hall’s Galerie Sadequain and its assembled crowd. Their faces were covered in flaking gold leaf, their eyes unreadable through strips of copper mesh sewn with small round mirrors. They showed one another their open palms, then walked around Amin’s sculpture, Infinity Egg III, which stood on a black granite pedestal. On either side were two terra cotta bowls holding orange and purple powder. The two scooped up the pigment into their hands and took turns painting the egg, then wrapped their arms around it in a lingering embrace. After completing this ritual, they once again showed one another their palms, now streaked with color, as they stared into each other’s eyes. They faced the audience, showing them their hands as well, before slowly walking out of the gallery and down the steps of Frere Hall. The work spoke of the blurring of male and female. Amin wished both Nazia and himself to find healing through their mutual appropriation of his egg.