Triangle
2022
Lahore Fort

Amin created the performance Triangle to activate his installation, Spice, for a group exhibition at the Lahore Fort in March 2022. Curator Sabah Husain titled the show If There Is Paradise on Earth, referencing a couplet by the Indo-Persian musician, poet and scholar Amir Khusrau (1253–1325 AD). Three Lahore-based artists—Umme Farwa Hassan Rizvi, Talal Faisal and Idrees Hanif—performed the work for Amin the night of the opening within his installation of five vertical works in copper positioned within 18 three-foot-by-three-foot squares of either turmeric or red chili. Wearing a white kurta over a white shalwar and a cubist mask of silver with nails protruding from it, Farwa sat on the floor, staring into a square of mirror. Idrees, wearing a white shalwar, his chest crusted with plaster of Paris and a mesh hood dotted with round mirrors, stood before a laptop, randomly rearranging prerecorded urban sounds that played throughout the 150-minute performance. Also caked in plaster, Talal made a series of seven predetermined movements. The three concluded the three-hour performance by carefully navigating the narrow pathways separating the squares of spice, repeatedly crossing one another’s trajectories, but never interrupting them. Significantly for Amin, who wrote his undergraduate thesis on Mogul architecture, the group show was installed in the Lahore Fort’s Summer Palace, a labyrinth of chambers that dates from the Shah Jahan period (1628-1658 AD). Its walls decorated with intricate frescoes and marble inlay, now faded, the palace spoke to Amin of ghosts. The smell of the nearly 200 pounds of spice in the low-ceilinged palace was powerful. Through this intentional insertion of the olfactory, Amin wished to summon the themes of empire, colonialism and magic conjured in Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune, in which the pursuit of “spice,” a drug that extends life, enhances the mind and is essential for inter-planetary travel, propels the narrative.