High Priest of Performance

A misunderstood cousin of dance and theatre, performance art is an odd creature. Some say she was born in Milan in 1909, from the manifesto-reading Futurists, others swear she was spotted after World War 1 in a cabaret in Zurich. Frustrated by the confines of traditional art, artists worldwide embraced her. And so, “The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture surface’’ observed Viennese artist Otto Muehl, and art can be anything: movement, an echo, even a scent. With over a dozen performance works in Karachi, Lahore, Dubai and Nagoya, as well as at the Royal Albert Hall in London, sculptor Amin Gulgee is the father of performance in Pakistan.

The son of legendary Modernist Ismail Gulgee - a man also influenced by ‘Action Painting’, a branch of performance - Amin is acclaimed for practice, experimental curatorial style and mentoring of young artists at his not-for-profit gallery. But playing the role of performance art pioneer is when he is truly fearless. He has created a vocabulary, space and audience for the art form. ‘’It’s because its so ephemeral”, he says about his passion. Copper and bronze - his sculpture’s materials - “are very permanent, and performance can’t be touched or captured, unless you are right there. Or you make a video.” In the 1960s, American artist Allan Kaprow coined the term ‘happenings’ for carefully orchestrated events that the audience can ‘simultaneously experience’. Amin’s solo show earlier this year, Washed upon the Shore was complimented by performances. The sight of Erum Bashir rolling in a room filled with coal under a black moon was hauntingly beautiful. Her white clothes slowly transformed to black, while a curious sound piece by Zeerak Ahmed and Haamid Rahim shadowed you through the gallery.

Amin Gulgee's curated performance is a mischievous, rowdy animal

Amin started his career making jewelry. He remembers the ‘amazing femininity’ of his Lahore clients. At a time when a young fashion industry was frowned upon, Amin conceived productions that melded fashion, theatre and art. The models wore his jewelry as well as ferocious looking headdresses and bustiers he had sculpted. People didn’t know it at the time, but performance art was being born.

Amin sees performance and sculpture as limbs from the same body. But where his sculptures are exact and classically graceful - Quranic letters tiptoe and levitate to meet your eye, a lace-y moon hangs like an emerald - his curated performance is a mischievous, rowdy animal. Raw and unabashed, they whisper, tickle, or confront. Nukta Art described one of his evenings as “ a chain of human energy...(it) tested the limits of where art began and ended, or if there was an end.” In 2014, his exhibition of performance and installation, Dreamscape, co-curated with Zarmeene Shah, had 50 artists respond to Yoko Ono’s claim, a ‘’… dream you dream together is a reality.’’ From an airy piece that sprayed fragrance on visitors as they walked through diaphanous layers, or an invitation to watch a film in bed with the artist, or being tied with ribbons torn from an artist’s mummified peel, the show was bursting and surprising.

The mother of modern dance, Martha Graham, called the dancer’s body ‘a living sculpture’. Fingers and arms heavy with metal and jade, Amin’s movements are lyrical and urgent. It comes as no surprise that he was interested in dance. His speech is bold and unapologetic; his curatorial work a labour of love. Founded in 2000, the Amin Gulgee gallery is very much a laboratory where artists, musicians and personalities from theatre and fashion can play. When you enter, whether through the skirt on a giant mannequin, (in Dreamscape) or to the sounds of 1970s-era khabarnamas (from the show The 70’s: the radioactive decade), you find a spectacular tussle of energy and movement.

In ‘’Where’s the apple Joshinder?’’, a dance performance he curated in 2014, his six characters trade moments of power and helplessness. They leap, stomp and drag each other within the steel framed “Char Bagh” - Amin’s 77 individually crafted bronze leaves, beautifully frozen in the act of falling. The leaves are at once solid and ethereal; when the performers set the“bagh” ablaze, you shudder when they clang to the ground. The 45-minute spectacle has the drama of his sculptures: black and gold, fire and mirrors, painted bodies and horned characters; it tells ancient stories of Eden and what makes us man and woman. The evening - sexy, uncomfortable, astonishing - showed Amin’s restlessness to explore the tension between time, space, movement and gender. “The three-dimensional was always important to me, so performance has been a logical next step.” Fascinated by the way African masks are worn in rituals - on warm bodies, not cold museum walls - he often incorporates his own objects in performances.

After the murder of his parents, floundering in pain, Amin created the form Cosmic Chappati

Choosing to be high priest of performance in Pakistan takes largesse - there’s no moolah in it. Works take months to orchestrate, often needing extensive funding. Feasts for the eyes or provocative and engaging, they are transient and without price tags. “My gallery is not economically profitable, it’s an open space for ideas” he says. “Art is important and I believe everyone should see it. I wish we had museums. You should be able to see an Ahmed Parvez next to a Bashir Mirza.”

Performance has its detractors along the lines of “Why don’t I just brush my teeth in a gallery and you can call it art?” But performance has the power to engage and its organic form enables it to touch the man in the rickshaw as much as connoisseurs of art. In a sensitive public art piece in 2011, artist Yaminay Chaudhri had musicians play a Pakhtun folk song, traditionally performed at weddings or harvests, on a vacant Karachi roundabout near the homes of the migrant Pakhtun community. By recreating a happy song from a hilly landscape in a congested, urban, adopted home, the piece gave the Pakhtun labourers a sense of belonging. Some even broke into dance. As Martha Graham famously said, movement never lies.

In 2007 Amin was touched by tragedy. The art world was plunged in grief and confusion with the murder of his parents. Floundering in pain, Amin created the form Cosmic Chappati. In its careful coils, winding and winding in hours of labour, you can see a son’s grief.  Years later, he used performance to work through his pain. In an event honouring the late eminent art personality Ali Imam, Amin performed The Healing. He was carried through the audience to the lap of his close friend, the hairstylist Rukaiya Adamjee, who shaved his head.

Today Amin is being carried onto an immense stage - he is chief curator of the 2017 Karachi Biennale. The international art event will be an epic journey, bigger than the copper structures he wrestles with in his studio. “It’s going to be the once-upon-a-time of Karachi” he says, referring to the 160-year-old NJV school, which will be the main venue. Obviously, he is excited by the ‘public’-ness of the space: “we’re recreating downtown Karachi and plan to engage the student body. We won’t be an alien entity.” He anticipates the “brave and innocent energy” that the event will produce. And it’s not just about the artists (from Pakistan and the rest of the world). In the true spirit of performance art, Amin is looking at the audience: the art will move through the arteries of the city to reach new viewers.

With the theme “Witness”, the Biennale tackles Kundera’s line ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memories against forgetting.”

“It’s a very loaded term,” Amin says. “We are witnesses to the past and to the future. New narratives will emerge from the Biennale and a questioning of the narratives expected from our part of the world. Karachi is unlike any place on earth!” he says. “There’s an urgency, a feeling of now or never.”

Zehra Hamdani Mirza is a Karachi-based writer and painter