Salam Gaudi
Impossible Growth 4 MAKERS – 26th October 2019
Performance
180 min
Karachi Biennale 2019
Abacus – 2004
Abacus – Calculate – 2005
180 min
Canvas Gallery – Karachi
Amin Gulgee’s performance Calculate was his first to take place in a gallery rather than on the catwalk. It was also the first—and only—time he showed his oil paintings. The performance, and paintings, were integrated into his solo exhibition of sculpture and installation, Other Works, at Canvas Gallery in Karachi, which featured dolls’ heads cast in bronze, many of which appeared pocked, torn or burnt. The exhibit, which opened soon after the American invasion of Iraq, seemed to capture the foreboding climate of the times. The heads Amin cast were from toys he had discovered at Disposal House, a dusty, cluttered store of bric-a-brac in Saddar, a colonial-era Karachi bazaar. He wished the viewer to be disoriented, even alarmed, by the show, which had an apocalyptic feel. In the driveway, a coughing rickshaw whose body he had refashioned in copper drove back and forth, spitting fumes. Inside the gallery, a discordant sound piece the artist had asked Mehdi Rizvi to compose played at full volume as lights blindingly flashed. Amid this cacophonous chaos, the sculptor Seema Nusrat, who had just finished art school, systematically flung the found dolls’ heads across a seven-foot, horizontal abacus with five rungs that Amin had fashioned out of steel. Stylist Tariq Amin had painted her face in exaggerated makeup so that she, too, resembled a macabre plaything. Positioned behind Seema was a large, curved board painted in dark gray. Stenciled upon in it in silverleaf letters from a font borrowed from Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily, was the word “Calculate,” suggesting a timely headline. As Seema tossed the dolls’ heads back and forth with increasing abandon, some shattered as they hit their mark, an unexpected yet disturbingly inevitable consequence of her actions.
Dish Dhamaka – 2002
Dish Dhamaka – 2002
Amin Gulgee Gallery:
Amin Gulgee launched Amin Gulgee Gallery in 2000 with an exhibition of his own sculpture, “Open Studio III.” The artist continues to display his work in the gallery, but also sees the need to provide a space for non-commercial and thematic exhibitions of his contemporaries. The gallery regularly collaborates with independent curators to realize large-scale projects. Amin Gulgee Gallery is a space open to new ideas and different points of view.
The gallery’s second show took place in January 2001. It represented the work created by 12 artists from Pakistan and 10 artists from abroad during a two-week workshop in Baluchistan. The local artists came from all over Pakistan; the foreign artists came from countries as diverse as Nigeria, Holland, the US, China and Egypt. This was the inaugural show of Vasl, an artist-led initiative (of which Amin Gulgee was a founding trustee) that is part of a network of workshops under the umbrella of the London-based Triangle Arts Trust.
The third show at the gallery, which took place in the spring of 2002, was titled “Uraan” and was co-curated by art historian and founding editor of Nukta Art Niilofur Farrukh and gallerist Saira Irshad. A thoughtful, catalogued survey of current trends in Pakistani art, this was an exhibition of 100 paintings, sculptures and ceramic pieces by 33 national artists.
Later that year, Amin Gulgee himself took up the curatorial baton with “Dish Dhamaka,” an exhibition of works by 22 Karachi-based artists focusing on that ubiquitous symbol of globalization: the satellite dish. This show highlighted the complexities, hopes, intrusions and sheer vexing power inherent in the production and use of new technologies.
In 2003, Amin Gulgee presented another major exhibition of his sculpture at the gallery, titled “Charbagh: Open Studio IV.” This was followed a year later by a one-man show dedicated to Italian creator Gino Marotta, one of the fathers of contemporary design and environmental art.
The gallery’s sixth and seventh shows were a pair co-curated by Amin Gulgee and artist and art critic Sheherbano Husain. For these shows, the two curators asked over 30 artists from across Pakistan to create one work inspired by Islamic calligraphy and another inspired by the human body. The back-to-back exhibitions were accompanied by the publication of twin scholarly catalogues bearing the exhibitions’ titles, Artists’ Voices: Calligraphy and Artists’ Voices: Body (Oxford University Press, 2006). That same year, the gallery hosted the exhibition “18@8: Kuala Lumpur to Karachi,” which was curated by the eminent gallerist Lim Wei-Ling and was accompanied by a catalogue. The show highlighted contemporary works in multiple media from the urban heart of Malaysia.
“Imag[IN]ing Cities” marked the gallery’s entry into the second decade of our new century. For this exhibition, Amin Gulgee Gallery joined forces with SPARCK, a pan-African program of cutting edge artists’ residencies, exhibitions, publications, film and video productions and performances that was founded in 2007 by Cape Town-based artist and academic Kadiatou Diallo and Paris-based art historian Dominique Malaquais. An exhibition of video, photography and sound pieces by over 50 artists from across Pakistan and the breadth of the African continent, this was the first-ever, large-scale encounter between new media artists from Africa and South Asia.
In January 2013, the gallery hosted two shows. The first was an exhibition of Amin Gulgee’s latest body of work, “Open Studio V: Through the Looking Glass,” the first major showing of his sculpture in Pakistan in a decade. The show travelled later that year to a gallery in New Delhi, India and is documented by a catalogue. “Open Studio V” was followed up a week later by a curatorial effort by Amin Gulgee at the gallery. Called “Riwhyti: One Night Stand,” this happening was a two-hour, simultaneous enactment of 23 performance works by more than 30 Karachi-based artists.
In March 2014, the gallery hosted “FRESH!” Co-curated by Amin Gulgee, Raania Azam Khan Durrani and Saba !qbal, this was an exhibition of 68 Pakistani artists age 30 and under from across Pakistan that was accompanied by a 150-page catalogue produced by PeaceNiche. A generational survey show, “FRESH!” included painting, photography, video, sound and performance works by Pakistan’s most promising new artists. In December of the same year, the gallery presented “Dreamscape.” Co-curated by Amin and Zarmeené Shah, this was an exhibition of installation and performance art by over 50 artists from Karachi and Lahore. The gallery launched the accompanying catalogue in December 2015.
In March 2016, Amin Gulgee Gallery presented “The 70s: Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade.” Amin Gulgee and co-curator Niilofur Farrukh asked over 40 artists from across Pakistan and its diaspora to meditate on that momentous decade in Pakistan’s history. The exhibition included the work of artists who lived at the time as well as younger artists who could only imagine Pakistani life then. It included painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. (An accompanying book will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018.) Gulgee and Farrukh teamed up again in 2017 to organize Karachi Biennale 2017, the city’s inaugural biennale. Farrukh was the CEO and Managing Trustee of KB17 and Gulgee a Trustee and its Chief Curator. ( KB Curatorial )
In April 2018 Amin Gulgee Gallery presented two shows. The first was “7: Open Studio VI.” This was a presentation of Amin’s latest body of work that traveled the following month to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna and MACRO in Rome, Italy for a four-month run. The second was “Outsiders.” This was a collaboration between the gallery and the Goethe-Institut Pakistan. The exhibition featured the traveling exhibition “Geniale Dilletanten,” curated by Mathilde Weh and Leonahard Emmerling, a comprehensive survey of urban subcultures in the Germany of the 1980s. Rooted in German art schools, punk and Dada, the movement represented a radical departure from the mainstream, marked by cross-genre experimentation. Amin Gulgee and fellow curators Zarmeené Shah and Zeerak Ahmed composed a response to the German show, exploring notions of sub/counter-culture in Pakistan from the 1960s to the present day as encountered in music, television, film, fashion, photography, painting, performance and social media.
Purdah
Amin Gulgee and Performance Art:
Amin Gulgee began formally engaging with performance art over a decade ago. As NuktaArt observed, “In Pakistan, where Performance Art is an emerging field, a handful of artists are incorporating it in their practice. Among them, Amin Gulgee has been at the forefront.” Over the years, he has staged over a dozen performance works in Karachi and Lahore, Dubai and Nagoya, Kuala Lumpur and London.
Zarmeené Shah noted in her essay “An Expansionist View: Amin Gulgee’s Practice” for the online journal Art Now Pakistan, “Where the connection with fashion is often overlooked in the context of Amin Gulgee’s involvement in performance art in recent years, an organic line of growth can be traced back to these shows in the early 2000s.” These shows included Alchemy in 2000, Sola Singhar in 2001 and River Dreams of Alexander in 2006. They pushed the boundaries of traditional fashion shows by using the catwalk as a platform to display not only Amin’s jewelry and sculpture but also to incorporate strong narrative and performance elements. Amin stopped making jewelry in 2007 and his involvement in fashion waned. His interest in performance, however, only continued to grow.
Early performances include The Healing, which took place in Karachi in 2010 at an event honoring the late pioneering artist and gallerist Ali Iman. For this work, two men carried Amin’s prone body through the assembled audience and placed him on the lap of a seated woman. She tenderly shaved his head, handing his hair to the two men, who ritualistically burned it in the flames of lit torches. This cathartic act saw Amin slowly rise to his feet and dance.
Another was entitled Love Marriage and was part of a group show called “Band, Baja, Baraat” that was curated by the Karachi gallerist Sameera Raja at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi in 2012. For this work, Amin and fellow sculptor Saba Iqbal sat poker-faced in a ten-foot steel cube strewn with fairy lights–he wearing a metal helmet, she wearing a metal bustier studded with nails, both created by Amin–as the students of IVS played their boisterous baraat, or wedding party. Audience members spontaneously sat next the “couple” and posed for photographs, just as one would at a conventional South Asian wedding. Throughout the performance, Amin and Saba, their faces painted an identical Kabuki white, wordlessly broke eggs into one another’s hands.
In 2014, Amin created two other performance works that dealt with gender. The first was entitled Paradise Lost and took place on the grounds of Karachi’s Frere Hall for Art Fest 2014 that was co-curated by Sameera Raja and Adeela Suleman. For this piece, Amin and choreographer and dancer Joshinder Chaggar set ablaze sheets of cotton that sheathed Amin’s installation Char-Bagh, a four-grid steel structure from which 77 individually created bronze leaves were suspended. As the fabric burned, Amin and Joshinder repeatedly called out one another’s names. By imagining a ritual that might have taken place thousands of years ago at Mohenjenadro, Amin attempted to take the viewer back to man’s earliest dreams and raise questions about what it means to be a man or a woman.
Amin continued working with Chaggar for Where’s the Apple, Joshinder? This was a 45-minute piece that was performed by six dancers and two musicians at the auditorium of the Karachi Arts Council later that same year. The choreography of the piece took place inside the same installation that had earlier been used for Paradise Lost and was divided into three acts: “Inside the Char-Bagh,” “Outside the Char-Bagh” and “Becoming the Char-Bagh.” In this Garden of Eden, age-old stories were told about beginnings and how the relationship between men and women evolved and developed.
Amin’s long-standing interest in both curatorship and performance work converged in January 2013 when he conceived “Riwhyti: One Night Stand.” This evening of performance art was a collateral event of the Fourth ASNA Clay Triennial. For this
Iqra – Works – Deprecated
Material:
Dimensions:
Recent Posts
Categories
- 1988 to 2000
- Amin Gulgee
- Amin Gulgee Gallery
- Curatorial
- General
- Group Show
- IMF Show
- Interviews
- Jewellery
- Locations
- Performance
- Podcast
- Print Media
- Public Works
- Solo Show
- 7
- 7.7
- Al-Nahda Royal Society
- Arabian Gallery
- Art Gallery
- Art Space
- Body and Soul
- Char Bagh
- Continuity – Kinetic Essence
- Cosmic Mambo
- IMF Show – The Search for light
- Indus Gallery
- Intercontinental Hotel
- Lahore Art Gallery
- Lawrence Gallery
- Looking for the Magic Center
- Open Studio
- Open Studio II
- Other Works
- PACC
- Rida Gallery
- Spooky action at a distance
- The Hilton Ankara
- The Search for Light
- The Spider Speaketh in Tongues
- Through the Looking Glass
- Walking On The Moon
- Washed upon the shore
- Zenith Gallery
- Urdu Press
- Wei-Ling Gallery
- Year