Charbagh The Spice Garden
Impossible Growth 4 MAKERS – 26th October 2019
Performance
180 min
Karachi Biennale 2019
Impossible Growth 4 MAKERS – 26th October 2019
Performance
180 min
Karachi Biennale 2019
Impossible Growth 4 MAKERS – 26th October 2019
Performance
180 min
Karachi Biennale 2019
Requiem
June 2022
Performance
Cité international des arts in Paris
In June 2022, Amin presented Requiem for the inauguration of ENTRELACS/INTERLACED at the Cité international des arts in Paris. This was an exhibition, symposium and series of performances in memory of Dominique Malaquais (1964-2021). An art historian and political scientist, Dominique dedicated her life and work to African worlds. Amin, who had known Dominique since they were freshmen at Yale, performed Requiem with Bart Legum, Dominque’s widower. Bare-chested, both wore white shalwar. Anointed in gold leaf, Bart’s head and shoulders were enveloped in a shroud of copper mesh that Amin had made for him. On Amin’s head was a copper helmet with curved, ram-like horns, rectangular eyes and a long, triangular nose. Like so many of Amin’s worn sculptures, these evoked a mythical era of his own making. (For this performance, they corresponded to his installation Elysian Fields for the accompanying show at the Cité’s gallery, where he reimagined the resting place of the heroic and virtuous in Greek mythology as a bed of coal strewn with fragments of Arabic text.) Hidden on an upper terrace of the Cité’s courtyard, Bart began the performance by producing screeching cords from an electric guitar. Amin frantically pushed himself through the assembled crowd below to a plastic sheet spread on the ground where nine plates holding powder of various colors had been placed in a circle. Crouching at their center, Amin slammed his palms to the ground and mournfully cried “Allah!” three times. He then grabbed handfuls of the pigment and tossed them over himself. Bart slowly descended a brief flight of steps, still playing his guitar, and perched on a high stool. Amin crawled towards him, marking the hem of his shalwar. Bart performed a song in both English and French that he had written, a kind of mantra that he sings to himself whenever Dominque’s absence becomes particularly painful. Solemnly, he sang: “Rest with the angels, my wonderful Do/You are an angel, my wonderful Do/You are my love and my light and my life.”
Kiss of the Spider Woman
8th April 2022
Performance
South Asia Institute, Chicago, IL, USA
Kiss of the Spider Woman was a collaborative performance that took place the night after the opening of Amin’s solo exhibition, The Spider Speaketh in Tongues, curated by Adam Fahy-Majeed, at the South Asia Institute in Chicago. The performers included old friends of Amin who had travelled from all over the United States to take part; young artists whom Adam had met as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and classical South Asian dancers based in the area. Amin held a series of conversations with each to determine how their individual narratives could merge with his. After jointly agreeing on how each performance would unfold, Amin selected one or more of his objects for them to wear. Nineteen performers enacted their works over 77 minutes. Some reacted to the work on display, which included sculpture, installation, sound and video. Shiwali Varshney Tenner, extended copper nails on her fingers, fluidly danced khattak-like movements before Zero Gravity. An androgynous-looking Dominique Knowles, wrapped in a silver bustier and holding a single copper leaf, stood motionless before the installation Liminal Letters. Some interacted with the audience: Anene Ejikeme, dressed as a traditional Nigerian woman, cat-eye sunglasses and Amin’s spiked mask obscuring her face, approached random people and asked, sotto voce, “What is your sexuality?” Irene Wa, flecked in gold leaf and wearing a silver helmet, placed her hands on people’s backs and made sonar-like sounds. Amin, a crushed sheet of copper tied around his midriff, a horned helmet on his head, allowed Hassan Raazee, whose face was clouded by mesh, to flog him then place a hard-boiled egg into his mouth. The performers, whether floating or interacting with the work or each other, seemed to merge into one. As Amin said during a post-show discursive session over Zoom, “It was a shared belief.” Keny de la Peña, who, like a medieval troubadour, walked back and forth before Amin’s projection Algorithm IV singing an incomprehensible mix of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, wearing not only Amin’s objects but a sarong that he himself had silkscreened, added, “It was a caring for each other.”
Material:
Dimensions:
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
The Irritable Heart
10th February 2022
Performance
Frere Hall – Karachi