Occupying No Man’s Land
No Man’s Land is a monograph of Amin Gulgee – a sculptor, a
performance artist and a curator. That should be a comprehensive description,
but it’s not. The more one hears and reads about Amin Gulgee the more the
mystery deepens.
No Man’s Land suggests that in between space of uneasy peace
in a zone of conflict, a space in which Amin gathers the fragmented, the wounded
and the heroic. Sometimes he is Eugène
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and sometimes his space becomes Théodore
Géricault’s Raft of Medusa.
The book has twelve essays by a wide
range of curators, novelists, artists, academics, critics from Pakistan and
across the globe. Amin asked the contributors to consider the book an
invitation to a party. They could write whatever they felt like.
A good place to start is in the
middle with the interview by Maryam Ekhtiar, curator at the
Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her neutral
prompts offer an unmediated narrative insight into the genesis of Amin Gulgee
the artist, in his own words. He takes us on his journey of 35 years. His
first creative work was jewelry which flew out of the confines of delicate
craftsmanship into something closer to sculpture. The catwalk of Karachi’s fashion
industry opened up the world of performance art that incorporated the bronze
and copper elements that led to his signature sculpture works. He relates
questions asked by street urchins at Karachi’s Jamshed Road where he was
working with welders. Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Questions
he says he is still searching the answers to. Amin explains his creative
process - a letting go, submitting to the process. “The thread that runs thru
my work is the thread itself. I hold on to it and it leads me where it wants to
go.”
The essay by Dominique Malaquis, a historian,
contemporary African art critic and researcher, is particularly poignant as she
sadly passed away in 2021. The following year, Amin honoured her with a Requiem
performed on the streets of Paris with her widower. He credits her with
discovering the artist within himself when they were both at Yale where she seduced
him away from economics and banking to attend art history classes. He graduated
with a double major in Economics and art history. Malaquais reflects on Amin’s
ability to bring out the connections between beauty and violence, pain and
healing, harnessing inner turmoil with immense strength producing work “both
terrifying and powerfully centering”.
Alexi Worth, A New
York based painter, curator, art critic, and writer sees Amin’s performances
mirroring his larger than life personality.
“Even before he ‘discovered’ performance Amin Gulgee was a performer”.
He sees Amin’s performances as “multicultural utopias” where “the dreams and
visions of people across the globe could unite”. He finds a parallel between Ismail Gulgees
abstract expressionism linked with calligraphy and Amin’s positioning of
religious icons within avant-gardism. He makes “being Muslim and being modern
seem not just reconcilable but synonomous”
Only two essays are reprints — the
one by Oleg Grabar and another by Dr. Kishwar Rizvi, who is the Robert Lehman
Professor in the History of Art, Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale
University. The other ten essays are new writings by Alexi Worth, Zarmene Shah,
Dominque Malaquais, Atteqa Ali, H M Naqvi, Maryam Ekhtiar, Gemma Sharpe, Simone
Wille, Robert Sagerman and Salima Hashmi.
The late Oleg Graber, Harvard’s
first Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, opens the
conversation with an essay he wrote for a 2007 catalogue. He was Amin’s advisor
for his dissertation on Islamic Gardens and presents a spiritual interpretation
to his work – ‘A new and original attempt at understanding the universe and
man’s role in it ‘.
The last essay, “Fearless” is by
Salima Hashmi, artist, art historian and under her term as Dean of National
College of Arts many of Pakistan’s most innovative artists emerged, taking their
place on international art platforms.
In between are essays that buzz with
discussions that one would expect to hear at any of Amin’s extraterrestrial events:
Amin as a story teller, an alchemist. Work that is monumental, work that is
ephemeral, work that is loud and rebellious, or holds the silence of quiet
pain. A postnational artist, an artist that is quintessentially Karachi. Work that reflects the politics of its time,
work that speaks to the universal soul. Some find connections with other
artists, some find Amin Gulgee defies categorization.
The beautifully produced book is
designed by Kiran Ahmed, edited by John McCarry, writer and coordinator of the
Amin Gulgee Gallery in Karachi since its inception in 2000. It is published by Skira
Editore, a world-leading art publisher based in Milan, Italy.
Centred between the two sets of
essays are some 300 pages of images of Amin Gulgee’s work beautifully photographed by Tapu Javeri, Asif
Raza, Humayun Memon, Shamyl Khuro and Nafees. The inclusion of a QR code brings
the performances back to life giving what was ephemeral a hidden permanence.
But the book does not end there. At
each book launch Amin Gulgee gives us more. In a Simerg interview he reveals
the role of his mother in producing this monograph. In 2007 she asked him “I
want you to do three things for me: one, give up smoking; two, do a book on
your work; and three — I don’t remember now, but it will come to me.”
Each review offers new interpretations,
becoming by default a personal encounter. Narendra Pachkhede’s poetic review
for Naked Punch is a perfect example. He calls No Man’s Land a ‘psychic
terrain’ where ‘the body becomes site,
the nation unravels, and the sacred is neither whole nor broken, but always in
flux.’ The book is an experience ‘a curatorial séance, a ritualised act of
shared unknowing.’ Amin Gulgee offers ‘a radical ethics of confusion. One that
welcomes contradiction, cultivates friction, and privileges encounter over
resolution’. He calls the Amin Gulgee Gallery ‘a sanctuary for the fragmented’.
And as the reader turns the last page ‘One does not finish this book. One exits
it, as from a dream half-remembered’.
Author HM Naqvi disentangles the
over-wrought threads of each feverishly excavated account into a disarmingly
simple sentence “Amin Gulgee demands attention .. you cannot look away.”
Durriya Kazi
September 22, 2025
Karachi
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