One Night Stand in Paris

In its investigative experimentation within the broadly defined rubric of interdisciplinary performance, “One Night Stand/Coup d’un Soir”, which took place on the 13th of May 2019, at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, manifested an organic, cacophonous conglomeration of interconnected artistic discourse, without the imposition of a putatively unifying narrative. As an exploration of creative process, it: openly questioned and experimented with the dynamic possibilities of what constitutes contemporary performance art; explored notions of agency in the constituent nodes whose interaction lies at the basis of performance (artist, audience, practice); as well as emphasizing the simultaneous ephemerality and vast amplitude of the sensorial experience that performance can exploit more efficaciously than any other contemporary art form. In its final realization, it transcended this; and therein lies the crux of its anthropological integrity – in its cacophony of intermingled anthropological-artistic insights, “One Night Stand” effectuated a profoundly holistic insight into the contemporary art world through the vector of performance.

In his collaborative, energetic approach to the exhibition’s organization, artist-curator Amin Gulgee staged an ambitious transcultural, interdisciplinary dialogue comprising the performances of 32 artists (and non-artists) from across the globe, three quarters of whom were in some way non-Western – whether peripheral/semi-peripheral; diasporic; hybrid – in the locational context of an art world centre, Paris. Yet the progressive nature of Gulgee’s curatorial approach is very much connected with the lived experience of chaotic plurality in Karachi. It avoids imposed narratives of radical alterity, whilst also subverting the extant power dynamics of the contemporary art world. His approach endeavours to establish a transcultural dialogue unmediated by national borders and identities, placing works together with attention to site-specificity and sensitivity to points of mutualism in their artistic discourse. In the resultant cacophony of unexpected dialogic engagement between works, he challenges the audience to subjectively interpret the reticular network of interconnected nodes, whilst the agents which comprise the network are themselves interacting as if they were accelerated particles in a collider.

A major aspect in the cogency of “One Night Stand” as an anthropology of performative contemporary art was the complete absence of self-explanatory rhetoric. Thus, the audience was forced to confront the sensory barrage performances unguided; their experiential perceptions were purely mediated by the singular cerebral topography that forms individual perspectives. This removed any unnecessary interlocutors, and the experience of the exhibition was solely dictated by their engagement with the performances, given the freedom and intellectual respect to form their own narrative tangents and dialogic connections from the multitude. Furthermore, unburdened by textual intervention, the anthropological insight into performance within the context of the global art world remained undiluted. In other words, the fact that the exhibition was not laden with explanatory literature allowed it to truly embody an artistic experiment, without a predetermined result. In this sense, “One Night Stand” incorporated the scientifically influenced, methodological emphasis on observation, temporal and locational specificity, and participant interaction that characterises anthropology within in its conceptual fabric. This is synthesised in the somewhat fraught term, “fieldwork”, as described by Gupta and Ferguson:

The difference between anthropology and… other disciplines, it would be widely agreed, lies less in the topics studied (which, after all, overlap substantially) than in the distinctive method anthropologists employ, namely fieldwork based on participant observation.

I believe that “One Night Stand” similarly proposed a reformulation in curatorial and discursive “fieldwork”; to shift towards an organically anthropological methodology. But what exactly does this shift towards an alignment with anthropological methodologies demand from contemporary art, without being contaminated by the problematics of the so-called “ethnographic turn”? As Tarek Elhaik astutely observes in his essay, “What is contemporary anthropology?”:

Ethnography as a concept is[…] a zone of turbulence. But it is not the only one at work in the multi-mediated relationship between art and anthropology. Perhaps the time has come to shift our attention somewhere else that is far from being given, as ethnography has been; something more imperceptible[…]

“One Night Stand” very much encapsulated Elhaik’s description of “somewhere else that is far from being given… something more imperceptible”, unconstrained by ethnography as a tool of definitive categorisation and delimitation, which has lost its relevance in our current context of global interconnectedness and hybridity. Elhaik then expounds on the relationship between contemporary art and anthropology:

[…]this affective economy of attraction, seduction and repulsion has generated one unfortunate consequence: the tropes of radical alterity and incommensurability have acquired greater force over the more interesting initial promises based on the ‘affinities’, ‘appropriations’, ‘hybridisations’ and ‘processes’ advocated from the early 1990s onward[…] Experiments in aesthetic form have continued to thrive but conceptual experimentation remains to be desired.

Amin Gulgee staged an interdisciplinary dialogue comprising the performances of 32 artists (and non-artists) from across the globe, three quarters of whom were in some way non-Western

The same could very much said of contemporary art. These initial promises heralded by 1989 – expressed in the third Bienal de La Habana, and admittedly even the misguided exoticism of “Magiciens de la Terre” – are nowhere near having been adequately realized when viewed against the backdrop of the seismic contextual shifts that have taken place in the last three decades. Experimentation in transcultural curatorial and discursive methodologies has stagnated, whilst artists themselves have evolved their practices to thrive in the current era of hyper-connectivity. Perhaps then, it is unsurprising that the potent dynamism of artist-curator Gulgee’s One Night Stand emanates from its experimental nature. Building on the laudable, if under-appreciated, pre-existing cultural framework of the Cité internationale des arts residency program, as well as his own social network in Paris, the Karachiite artist-curator constructed a reticular assemblage of nodes, the perspectival scope of which was augmented by their interdisciplinary and transcultural nature. Evincing the efficacious potentiality of performance in applying this progressive methodological approach, the exhibition realised a conceptual exploration of affinity; hybridisation; appropriation; and creative process, in the form of intertwined topographies of dialogic artistic interaction. In this manner, “One Night Stand/Coup d’un Soir” manifested: “a persuasive example of the potentials for productive new dialogues between art and anthropology, which should be fully and actively pursued.”

“One Night Stand” was realized with an acute sensitivity to spatial, sensory (beyond the merely visual), processual and conceptual topographies, underpinned by an emphasis on temporal and locational specificity. This provided structure to the cacophonous interactions that confronted a somewhat unprepared, but intensely engaged audience. To demonstrate the operation of these topographies, I shall briefly outline the most conspicuous topographical stratum; the substructure of sonic stratospheres, which melded with the spatial context of the venue to provide distinct atmospheric settings for artistic interaction. Saudi Arabian DJ Mohanned E. Nassar performed a live set, entitled “In Betweens”, in the space between the exhibition and the courtyard, adjacent to the entrance. In the atrium, French musician/composer André Fernandez’s powerful, distinctly spiritual, vocal entreaties responded organically to Venezuelan artist Florencio Botas Verdes’ own spiritual entreaties, blown from a conch, emanating from the iconographic pastiche of his shrine at the bottom of the stairs leading to the performative gauntlet. Moreover, The gauntlet, or, the exhibition space leading to the auditorium, was the most densely populated and cacophonous topography, with the audience bombarded from all angles by sensory stimuli. It was therefore highly appropriate that the soundscape in the gauntlet was anchored by Pakistani artist Abi Tariq’s choreographed sound/body performance, “Hexentanz II (Witch Dance)”, characterized by the distortion of his transmogrified voice and expressive bodily movement, a multi-sensory performance, contrapuntally reinforced by Honi Ryan’s “LISTEN in”, which turned sonic attention inwards to the heartbeat in a space of distraction.

This leads to the appropriate point of departure for my analysis of the artistic corpus of “One Night Stand”, which lies at its topographical epicentre. The auditorium epitomized the transcultural, interdisciplinary approach that formed the basis of the entire exhibition’s interwoven, cacophonous artistic dialogue – exploring affinities; hybridisations; appropriations; and creative processes. Whilst it would belie the chaotic complexity of the exhibitionary logic of “One Night Stand” to give the impression that there was a concrete narrative progression traversing the route to the auditorium, it was certainly a microcosmic reification of its conceptual framework; the beating heart at the core of the exhibition’s artistic circulatory system.

On the stage of the darkened auditorium, the individual strands of the artistic dialogue comprising the performances of Brazilian composer Mateus Araujo, Iranian musician Aida Nosrat and Amin Gulgee became so thoroughly interwoven that they ostensibly mutated into a tripartite performance, a singular entity. Araujo performed his experimental contemporary piano compositions, whilst Nosrat responded with “Break Free from Self Made Prison”, her ethereally beautiful voice weaving, without words, the complex tapestry of the liberating anagnorisis that she has experienced in relocating to Paris from Tehran three years ago, exhorting the intensely personal process of becoming aware and breaking free of the arbitrary shackles of the self. In Gulgee’s performance, “Ablution: (weeping)”, the artist-curator was imprisoned by a ring of seven unlit candles, in the dark adjacent to the only light source, the algorithmic projection from his recent series of exhibitions, entitled ‘7’, randomly generating the deconstructed forms of his calligraphic metalwork, a monochromatic ostinato constantly darkening/lightening the space and providing the rhythmic and conceptual adhesive to the performances. The transcendental atmosphere created by their organic interaction only further encouraged symbiosis, and the performers’ bodies began to physically embody this in their movements, yet perpetually incarcerated by their parallel realities, their ‘self-made prisons’ — Araujo’s piano stool; Gulgee’s seven candles and projection; and for Nosrat, the centre stage of the vocalist. They are imprisoned by their creative processes, yet venerate them as highly personal, spiritual phenomena to which they have devoted themselves absolutely.

The performances of Brazilian composer Mateus Araujo, Iranian musician Aida Nosrat and Amin Gulgee became so thoroughly interwoven that they ostensibly mutated into a tripartite performance

In this atmospheric context, the fourth performative agent in the auditorium subtly subverted the imposition of a clear-cut narrative, adding a further element of unexpected nuance to the artistic discourse, partially overlooked by the audience. Reclining on seats in the audience, the Parisian computer scientist watched videos of the conflict in Syria on Youtube for the entire seventy-minute duration, with noise-cancelling headphones rendering him completely oblivious and unreceptive to the transcultural, interdisciplinary exaltation of the spiritual ‘ablution’ of their creative processes. This quadrilateral dialogue metonymously encapsulated the stimulating experimentation of “One Night Stand” and its methodological approach; the results offer up multifarious interpretations. Pecquet’s addition to the dialogue could be a self-reflexive embodiment of a contemporary “Western gaze”: oblivious to the fecund potentiality of transcultural production that avoids its mediation, fixated instead on ghoulish documentation of violence. It could just as easily have been a comment on our collective obsession with technology and destruction, a dichotomous juxtaposition of the trifocal veneration of the creative process on stage. “One Night Stand”, to its anthropological credit, offered no definitive answers.