THE TROJAN DONKEY

2 THE TROJAN DONKEY

April 25, 2020 9:18 pm—11:13 pm PST

Curated By Amin Gulgee Sara Vaqar Pagganwala www.facebook.com/TheTrojanDonkey Adam Fahy-Majeed 4 CONTENTS

8 Introduction Amin Gulgee, Sara Vaqar Pagganwala, Adam Fahy-Majeed

14 Those Days Salima Hashmi

16 Performance Art In Pakistan John McCarry

28 Chorus 60 Soliloquy 92 Enclosure 122 Habitat 156 Ritual 186 Ventilation 214 Lament 248 Ecstasy 280 Metamorphosis 312 Catharsis 342 Hallucination

386 Ecstasy Matters Lionel Manga

392 The Trojan Donkey Anne Midgette

396 On Breath Bina Shah

400 Curators 6 The new millennium is very different from what We presented 80 works from over 25 countries city. This is a place which, despite its lack INTRODUCTION was envisioned in The Jetsons, an American and, although there was great diversity in of infrastructure and history of violence, animation sitcom from the early 1960s which the cultural background of the artists, certain resiliently carries on. predicted that the 21st century would be a themes resonated in our show revealing our For “The Trojan Donkey” we requested the Space Age utopia. On September 11th 2001, shared experience in this time of plague. As artists to produce performance works either the catastrophic terrorist attacks against the we jointly wrote the text for the catalogue, prerecorded or live for our virtual happening. United States occurred ushering in a new era Adam and I organized the participants into In a few instances we included pre-existing of wars and fear. Walls and barriers between groups of seven and eight. The eleven videos that we thought were relevant to our the developed and developing worlds became sections begin with Chorus and include topics concept. RoseLee Goldberg has written: harder to penetrate and the human race such as Enclosure, Ventilation and Ecstasy, “Performance has been a way of appealing grew more divided both economically and ending with Hallucination. directly to a large public, as well as shocking philosophically. The concept of the Trojan Horse was audiences into reassessing their own notions In 2020, due to the global pandemic popularized not by Homer but by Virgil in Book of art and its relation to culture.”3 We too of Covid-19, this separation was intensified 2 of his epic poem Aeneid. “Do not trust the strove for such a reassessment. As the iconic and now we are all told to stay at home and horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks performance artist Marina Abramović once avoid contact. In these times of isolation, even when they bring gifts,” warns the priest said, “I’m really a warrior of art.”4 “The Trojan the uplifting words of Maya Angelou come Laocoön. The Trojan Horse enters the walls Donkey” tried to unite these disparate global to mind: “Love recognizes no barriers. It of Troy bringing with it a mercenary army “warriors” to enter the proverbial walls of Troy. jumps, hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates of Greeks who ransack the city. Sara, Adam walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”1 and I also wished to infiltrate. It was a way of “The Trojan Donkey” attempted to be this conveying challenging ideas and concepts to Amin Gulgee vehicle of “love” penetrating walls. This each other, thereby destroying preconceived online exhibition curated by Sara Pagganwala, notions and stereotypes and reminding Adam Fahy-Majeed and myself focused upon ourselves of our collective humanity. Ironically performance as a conduit of expression we used the internet as a platform; the Trojan and dissent. We approached artists both in horse is also the term for a type of harmful Endnotes Pakistan and abroad to contribute videos code or software that looks legitimate but can 1 Maya Angelou. 2013. “Maya Angelou’s Facebook for our social media platform. Our approach be dangerous to your data and network. Our Page.” Facebook, January 11, 2013. was cross-disciplinary: In addition to visual intention, however, was to be “harmful” only to http://www.facebook.com/Maya.Angelou/. artists, we asked architects, students, dancers, the barriers of the mind that separate us. 2 https://www.facebook.com/TheTrojanDonkey/. musicians, actors, poets and writers to The horse was replaced by a donkey 3 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism participate. Many of the works were created because for us donkeys are a symbol of to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, specifically for the show, becoming a postcard Karachi. It is an animal that not only carries 2011), 214. of our times; some of them were live. On an unforgiving burden but is also used for 4 Emma Brockes, “Performance Artist Marina April 25th, from 9:18 pm to 11:13 pm (Pakistan chariot races flying across the city. In Pakistan, Abramović: I Was Ready to Die,” The Guardian, May 12, 2014,https://www.theguardian.com/ Standard Time), these videos were uploaded to call someone a donkey means that they artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic- onto our Facebook page, The Trojan Donkey.2 are stubborn; this characteristic defines my ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours. 8 I recall the very first time I did a performance. yourself. The scope however, of performance It is a frigid wind-blown summer’s morning in art cannot be contained. The definition too, is London. My skin blanches as I enter my studio not fixed. One thing though that differentiates space at Central St. Martins to set up. I can’t it from other mediums is the ability to have/ decide whether to go on or to stop and normal provoke a reaction in real time. That audience/ doesn’t feel so normal anymore as my tutor, performer exchange of energies in that very Pam Skelton, pushes me forth. I feel like my moment. heart is in my mouth and is beating so loud I’ll Suddenly, the prerequisites of the go deaf within my own mind with its pounding. performance change drastically. The way we I stand behind a cutwork screen, which consume art began to change with Covid-19, offers me that much amount of closure to as does the way we present it with an ever- perhaps pacify my mind from freezing and evolving meaning. The Trojan Donkey took blanking out on me. I peep through the performance art in the digital hemisphere and negative spaces to the group of people performance was made on the internet. Here, waiting to give me a critique, but something the performer/audience exchange of energies bizarre happens. As I take a deep breath and was made through tiny pixels. Reactions that begin my performance to carry out a ritual with were provoked in real time came in the form ceramic bowls of water behind the screen, a of comments on Facebook with emoticons trigger switches and I am no longer Sara. When representing the expressions of hundreds of the water drips, it’s as if more atmosphere is people watching live at that moment. what is required, it feels as though someone While curating, sometimes there are has poured dry ice on the cold concrete floor periods with exceptional integration and and I feel a chill up my spine. It is too late to integrity and sometimes there are periods with look back now. And never did I look back exceptional seclusion as well. In one of those again. moments of seclusion, I thought to myself, is A modicum of personal duress and the internet the death of performance art? goosebumps of the literal and metaphorical The Trojan Donkey taught me otherwise. kind, She, performance art, took over me. And The digital age “took the credit for our from that day to this, I question what defines second symphony1, rewritten by machine on it. And who we become when we perform. new technology”2. Internet did not kill the Endnotes Where does this dividuality occur and where performance star; on the contrary, it did quite 1. Lal Jadoo/Red Magic, a surrealist happening of simultaneous performance art that happened on does one cross that negligible line to become the opposite. March 15th, 2020 and streamed live, was the the this other? What is performance art and where first symphony; The Trojan Donkey being referred to does it happen? Sara Vaqar Pagganwala as the second symphony (exhibit). If you ask me what performance art is 2. Woolley, B; Downes, G; Horn, T, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. The Age of Plastic. Retrieved from I’d tell you quite simply that it is the delegation https://genius.com/Buggles-video-killed-the- of your body to use as a medium to express radio-star-lyrics 10 To define the project of The Trojan Donkey, it contemporary; a metaphoric model that can States’ presidential elections, and the United was pertinent to return to the Iliad. Yet in the be simultaneously applicable to computing Kingdom’s ‘Brexit’ referendum. These actors Homeric epic delineating the decade-long malware, asymptomatic viral transmission and set up ‘many platoons’ of pages, profiles and conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, pharmacological intervention. Inasmuch, it has groups to strategically manipulate specific we find that whilst offering frequent proleptic become a beast of burden for conceiving of sections of ‘the wider culture’ for their divisive allusions to the fall of Troy, it never overtly micro-interventions, which are imbued with and destabilising ends. refers to the ruse of the wooden horse. Indeed, the potentiality of macroscopic catalysis in The ‘invisible load’ of The Trojan Donkey it is in the narrative exposition of the Odyssey their replicability. was to invert this insidious utilisation of social that the destruction of Troy – and its central To aptly emphasise its performative media as a mode of schismatic separation. In deceit – are explicitly illuminated. However, utility, it therefore seemed appropriate to a time of enforced separation, we intended this is ancillary to the thrust of the epic poem, reformulate this allusive metaphor. A Trojan it to become a means of connection through which speaks of the subsequent mutual Donkey is capable of being harnessed to an the amorphous vehicle of performative destruction ensured by the violent actions invisible load, which cumulatively outweighs contemporary art. Even whilst the sensorial of the Greeks in achieving their objective, its individual stature. Beyond the singular potential was limited to a virtual experience, it centring on the further decade of tribulations manifestation, it: ‘… offers many platoons, offered possibilities that transcended those of faced by its mastermind, Odysseus. capable of strategically addressing the wider a more typical performance happening. It was As a multifaceted agent of change, the culture, pointing to replicable solutions completely accessible to a global audience wooden horse is so potent that it catalyses the through demonstration. This is facilitated that was further augmented by the variety and complete negation of the extant system; and by a multidisciplinarity that produces sheer number of participants. Therein lies the in this context, it marks the fatal culmination many strategies.’1 Thus, artistic production potentiality of performance; its adaptability. of the Heroic Age of Greek mythology, and the embodying a Trojan Donkey: ‘… can contain the The digital mechanics of Facebook commencement of a new epoch. The Iron Age seeds of multiple strategic outcomes’.2 offer the opportunity to observe statistical begins, as defined by Hesiod in Works and The object of The Trojan Donkey’s measures of impact, or in Facebook- Days: history replaces mythology; and there experimental proposition was to engage speak, ‘Insights’: People Reached; Post is an even greater separation between the the creative energies of a wide range Engagements; Page Likes; Page Followers; Gods and human beings, whose cruel caprices of individuals across disciplines and Page Views; as well as each of these for any replace those of their deities. continents at the zenith of global lockdown. specific upload. The figures these ‘Insights’ In its canonical origin story, we can Simultaneously, it set out to infiltrate an even contained dwarfed those possible for a observe the nature of the Trojan Horse as wider range of people through the activation physical performance art happening. In short, an embodiment of transmutation, with its of pre-existing social networks, and the it reached thousands of people across the multifarious transferability deriving from its operation of social media feeds. The choice of globe, and has continued to grow since its liminality. It lies between the positive and the Facebook as the primary platform was obvious. inception in April. Certain uploads have been negative, the creative and the destructive; its It is one of the principal Trojan Donkeys in our viewed thousands of times, and have reached overall meaning defined by the human agents era of hyper-connectivity. Indeed in 2016, its more than three thousand users. The page is that instrumentalise its multi-layered structure political utility as such became conspicuous its own documentation and will exist for as to precipitate a certain transformation. in its well-documented instrumentalisation long as Facebook continues to exist. All whilst This indicates its ubiquitous utility in the by malignant actors in both the United being inherently navigable by anyone with 12 access to the internet and the social media platform. Given the immediacy of its realisation in the unprecedented paradigm of COVID-19, The Trojan Donkey has become a historical document. It initiated interconnection in a time of separation. It proposed an alternative usage of a maligned medium that has demarcated societal divisions. It demonstrated the adaptability of performance in the sphere of contemporary art. And perhaps most importantly, it vindicated the potential of spontaneous experimentation within a context of uncertainty.

Adam Fahy-Majeed

Endnotes 1 Francis T. Marchese, Media Art and the Urban Environment: Engendering Public Engagement with Urban Ecology (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), p. 49. 2 Marchese, p. 49. 14 As an art student in England in the early when patronage was forthcoming on a national recordings were put into a steel trunk and very THOSE DAYS 60’s I was fortunate enough to be in an level for the arts and culture. This decade saw few survived. But Akkar Bakkar (for children), interdisciplinary program, which allowed one the formation of the Pakistan National Council Such Gup and Taal Matol brought us much joy to choose courses in the performing arts of the Arts, Lok Virsa, the Folk Art Museum, and the fact that they are still remembered alongside the regular visual arts foundation the National Performing Arts troupe and so more than 40 years later speaks for itself. year offerings. I chose ‘Movement and Drama’ many other initiatives. Pakistan Television was which was an interest before I ever went to also coming into its own. The Zia Mohyeddin England. Three years later, as a young teacher Show and Nahid Siddiqui’s Payal ensured at NCA, I had a chance to try out some of that dance and dramatic performance were these ideas and skills when NCA hosted a given a space and an audience which would State Guest. We were called upon to present a witness quality as the norm. For myself, PTV visual mosaic of the various regional cultures offered the opportunity together with Shoaib Salima Hashmi of Pakistan (both East and West) and we Hashmi (a graduate of RADA) to assemble decided to incorporate music and mime as a team of the most talented performers-in- part of the presentation. Having been lucky the-making from NCA, Government College enough to study the art of Marcel Marceau, and wherever we could find them. Thus in a that great maestro of mime, during my years couple of years, we had Salman Shahid, Arshad in Europe, I worked with the students at NCA Mahmood, Samina Ahmed, Naveed Shehzad, to devise a seamless narrative of sound, Irfan Khoosat, Farooq Qaiser, Nayyara Noor and music, movement, costume and image. The so many others bringing ideas stemming from presentation became part of NCA’s repertoire everyday experiences which were knitted into and was repeated on many occasions a loose, improvisational format, partly scripted including the visit of Queen Farah Diba. and partly dreamt up on the spot. Mime, music, At the Centenary celebrations of movement, performance, sound and dialogue the College in 1976, an hour-long dramatic (or silence) made each episode an amazingly presentation titled ‘Bargad Ka Drakht (The evocative and energising experience. Shoaib Bunyan Tree), depicting the history of Mayo Hashmi was the director/impresario who kept School and NCA, incorporated dance, mime, order in what was often an unruly, ebullient puppets, film, sound and light. This was the cast of characters! The ‘set’ was kept to a beginning of the notion of ‘performance’ as minimum, the costumes usually unisex and an important part of the student experience severe, with a few carefully chosen props, and at NCA. It led to the setting up of a ‘Mime a tight schedule. Society’ and a ‘Puppet Society’ at NCA, which The satire loved by the audience fine-tuned many budding talents who are occasionally stepped on some very important known creative professionals today. toes, which meant an occasional reprimand This was in the 1970’s—perhaps the for PTV bosses, but we survived until July 5th most innovative decade in our cultural history 1977 when Pakistan changed forever. The 16 While considered mainstream in the West, a recreation of a work that he had originally People’s Art Historical Garden Centre, which PERFORMANCE performance art is still an emerging field in enacted in London in 1970. Inspired by the took place at Grey Noise, Lahore in 2009, a Pakistan. There are a number of reasons for flotsam he saw in the waters that surrounded man tore pages from Akbar Naqvi’s Image and ART IN this. First, there is little institutional backing for his studio, Araeen created 16 circular discs, Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture it. While in the West, museums have presented 24 inches in diameter, and painted them red. in Pakistan, a well known but contentious PAKISTAN major retrospectives of performance artists He and a group of colleagues tossed them survey of Pakistani art, first published in (for example, Marina Abramović’s “Seven into the water; he then documented their 1998. The man folded and glued the pages Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim in New movement every day for two weeks with a into tiny envelopes, placed seeds in them, York in 2005), in Pakistan there are almost camera. In another approach to performance, and handed them out to the audience. This no museums of contemporary art. Those Sheema Kermani launched Tehrik-e-Niswan apparently was Alesworth’s response to being museums that do exist, contemporary or (Women’s Movement) in 1979. Drawing on described as more of a horticulturist than otherwise, are small and woefully under traditional styles of storytelling from the an artist in the book. In 2012, Sarah Ahmed John McCarry funded. Second, most galleries are reluctant subcontinent that involve dance, music and Mumtaz performed Everything Will be OK at the to engage with performance art as it offers dialogue, the troupe continues to perform National College of the Arts (NCA) in Lahore. no obvious commercial incentive. And third, a short political plays that address the rights For this work, the artist sat in front of a mirror body on public display, especially a female one, of women and marginalized minorities. And putting on makeup and then removing it. She is inherently problematic in a conservative in 1980, the action painter Ismail Gulgee and then stitched her stockings with gold thread, Muslim society like Pakistan’s. a visiting Belgian artist painted two large as if to repair her legs, damaged by Cerebral Performance art in Pakistan has begun abstract canvases side by side before an Palsy since childhood. Repeatedly shrieking to gain traction only over the past decade. audience at the Karachi Arts Council. “Everything will be OK” in Urdu, she tried on This is not to say that performance art was There are few other recorded and flung aside several pairs of shoes before not attempted before then. In the 1970s, performative works until the late 1990s. One settling upon a gold pair. Other works have when performance came to prominence in of the first examples of this new wave was been performed as part of gallery shows and the United States and Europe, some Pakistani Uzma Durrani’s Ignitable Souls, from 1996, residencies over the past decade. One notable artists did engage with it in some form or the which took place over a 50-minute period at example is Roohi Ahmed’s video Out of Bounds other. One of the earliest performative works the Pakistan National Council of the Arts in (31 min. 57 sec.) which was shown at AAN was Salima Hashmi’s Handa Hubalna (How to Islamabad. In this, the artist, dressed in red, lit Gandhara Art Space in Karachi in 2018 as part Boil an Egg) from 1972. This originally appeared a fire then covered herself in its ash. In 2005, of her solo exhibition, “The Distance Between as a skit in Such Gup, a popular sketch comedy Amin Gulgee asked Seema Nusrat to perform Two Points,” curated by Aziz Sohail. In it, the program written by Shoaib Hashmi that aired his work Abacus for him. This was part of his artist meticulously sewed her own hand with on state-run PTV. In it, Hashmi, speaking in multi-media solo show, “Other Works,” at red thread while miraculously drawing no the Urdu of a high-society housewife, sets out Canvas Gallery in Karachi. Wearing moppet- blood. to explain how to boil an egg and then does like makeup and a wig, she systematically everything but. smashed colonial-era dolls heads threaded While a rare occurrence in the early 2000s, In 1974, Rashid Araeen performed onto a horizontal abacus for three hours today performance is increasingly becoming Chakras in Jheel Park in Karachi at the behest straight beneath a sign that read “Calculate.” integrated into the Pakistan art scene. This of the pioneering gallerist Ali Imam. This was In David Alesworth and Adnan Madani’s has led to a noteworthy development: The 18 emergence of the curated group performance in recent years. In Syed Ammad Tahir’s Mirror, When we invited the artists to be part of of sectarian violence, Muhammad Ali and show. The first example was “Riwhyti: One Mirror on the Wall, the artist revealed a piece the show, we spoke to them about the Manizhe Ali sat as likenesses of the Mona Night Stand,” curated by Amin Gulgee at that allowed the public to peer into the idea of a ‘collective dream’. We asked Lisa in voluminous black skirts before a wall his gallery in Karachi in 2013. This was a privacy of his bedroom. Audience members them to think about the space of the of 1,300 red roses knitted by Muhammad Ali sympathetic venue for a comprehensive took turns sitting on benches to watch him dream, the potentiality within that, and over a period of a year. The work addressed display of performance as the gallery, called dance before a mirror as he adorned himself the shifts in reality that make sense within the duality of human nature, the masculine the Amin Gulgee Gallery and established in with makeup, a wig, jewelry and high-heel it, that are possible within that space, and the feminine, and the in-between state 2000, is a non-commercial, artist-led space. shoes. Danish Raza’s Sacrifice and Surrogates like for Alice in the space through the of being out of sync with a majority. A work The sculptor has himself engaged with was a commentary on the uneven history of looking glass. We asked what the dream that directly encouraged participation from performance since the year 2000, first in democracy in Pakistan. Carrying a cardboard was, a question of critical importance, the audience was Shalalae Jamil’s Things runway-based shows that paired his jewelry box, he led a goat, a Pakistani flag tied around the answers to which would define what that Happen in Bed # 1. In it, the artist lay on a and sculptures with the movements of fashion its neck, through the bustling gallery handing ‘Dreamscape’ would become. We referred mattress on a landing of the gallery. Positioned models, then in works that involved himself onlookers a piece of paper that posed a single to Yoko Ono’s famous quote: ‘A dream you next to her was an A4-size piece of paper that and personal narratives. question: Should we sacrifice the goat or dream alone is only a dream. A dream you proposed: “You are invited to watch a six- For “Riwhyti: One Night Stand,” not? The audience was asked to tick a box dream together is a reality.’ 1 minute minute film with the artist in a bed. which was a collateral event of the 4th ASNA and then cast their “vote.” In Black Umbrella, Please limit your exchange to a greeting and Clay Triennale, Gulgee invited 26 artists to Muzzumil Ruheel and a group of fellow artists, a good-bye.” The film, shot while she was simultaneously perform 19 works over a period dressed identically in black with kohl applied Sunil Shanker and Kashif Hussain, both actors pursuing her Master’s degree in Chicago, was of two hours. The artists he engaged were at the eyes and carrying open umbrellas, from the National Academy of Performing Arts based on the artist’s personal memories and an eclectic bunch that included painters, shadowed members of the audience in a (NAPA) in Karachi, climbed ropes suspended past lives. By projecting it on the ceiling and sculptors, photographers, art students, actors, commentary upon surveillance. The crowd, from the ceiling, their mouths shut with tape inviting audience members to lie next to her to fashion designers and musicians. This reflects which numbered in the hundreds by the end of in an apparently Sisyphean struggle against view it, the artist wanted to further explore her the artist-curator’s longstanding interest in the evening, was at once perturbed, amused, censorship. In a display of endurance, Omer preoccupation with the challenges presented multidisciplinary efforts. The approaches to baffled and intrigued. Wasim stood with his face in a pillow against by the relationship between private and public. performance in the show were as varied as the This was followed by “Dreamscape,” a pillar of the gallery for a period of three performers themselves. In one, Salman Hassan which Amin Gulgee co-curated with Zarmeene hours. On either side of him were casts of In January 2015, Zahra Khan curated “A String and S.M. Raza, both dressed in black shalwar Shah at the Amin Gulgee Gallery in December his legs in concrete, cut off at the knee. This Quartet” at Satrang Gallery in Islamabad kameez, faced one another over a white sheet 2014. This included 48 artists and was was presented with two of his installations. which included the performance works of four upon which were placed terra cotta vessels an exhibition of not just performance but In one, he had stencilled in chalk a personal women artists: Natasha Jozi, Shanza Elahi, containing, water, sand and red pigment. They installation as well. The exhibition ran for statement in several places on the gallery’s Farwa Hassan Rivi and Nida Ramzan. And began the performance by bathing their feet four days. As in Riwhyti: One Night Stand, the floor. As was the intention, these fraught, in March 2016, Hajra Haider Kharrar curated with the water. At the end of the show, after performances were executed simultaneously private declarations were destroyed by “About Time” for the NAPA International enacting a series of self-designed rituals, the night of the opening. The installations the shuffling feet of the curious viewers Theatre and Music Festival in Karachi, also a they lay motionless on the sheet, the water remained for the duration of the show. Shah who thronged the venue. Unwittingly, the group performance show. Rather than taking dyed red and spilled all around them, the terra wrote in her introductory essay, “Whatever crowd had completed the work through this place in a gallery setting, this was presented cotta in shards, in an apparent commentary the Dream May Be,” for the accompanying “performative” act. In a work that was meant upon a stage. Featuring Zeerak Ahmed, on the violence that has convulsed Pakistan catalogue: to express their empathy for the victims Yaminay Chaudhri, Shalalae Jamil, Seher 20 Naveed, Fazal Rizvi and Omer Wasim, the The next month, on October 21, the inaugural art of the 1990s in which she used plastic “Mix Tape [1]”, curated by Sara Pagganwala 70-minute exhibition unfolded in a temporal Karachi Biennale 2017 (KB17) opened at the surgery on her own body. at Canvas Gallery in September, 2018 was sequence, rather than being presented as a Narayan Jagannath Vaidya High School (NJV) Muhmmad Ali sat in the room where yet another example of a group exhibition spatial juxtaposition. in Saddar, an area downtown. Conceived ORLAN’s photographs were displayed and of performance art. Pagganwala has worked In “Promises to Keep,” held at apexart, by Chief Curator Amin Gulgee and his team brushed his teeth continuously for three hours. extensively with performance as both an artist New York from June 8 to July 29, 2017, Lahore- (which included Curator at Large Zarmeene By the end of the evening, his white kurta and curator. She is also part of the adjunct based curator Rabbya Naseer also explored Shah, Assistant Curators Zeerak Ahmed, seemed to be covered with bloody saliva. In faculty in the Liberal Arts department at the the possibilities of a group presentation of Sara Pagganwala and Humayun Memon and Kanwal Tariq’s work, Any Last Words, several Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture performance art. This was an exhibition of Curatorial Team Member Adam-Fahy Majeed), performers tied inside black garbage bags lay (IVS) in Karachi, where she designed and 14 works by 12 Pakistani women artists that KB17 presented the work of 182 artists from in a heap in a corridor, twitching within. Batool introduced performance art as a course for the showcased performance largely through five continents in 12 locations across the city.2 Zehra painstakingly created an ornate carpet first time in Pakistan. For this exhibition, 26 documentation. Herself a performance artist, The opening was activated by the performance in ash. She then lay down upon it, as if to performance artists, almost all of them women, Naseer has undertaken the unprecedented works of 17 artists from all over Pakistan, who sleep, destroying the delicate arabesques with including Sheema Kermani, Nida Ramzan, (and invaluable) task of compiling an archive had responded to an open call for performance the movements of her body. Talal Faisal lay in Sarah Ahmed Mumtaz, Noor Ahmed, Maha of performance art in Pakistan. The show organized by the curatorial team. These were a pair of shorts, repeatedly stamping himself Minhaj and Zoya Alina Currimbhoy, performed investigated not just performance and its anchored by the presence at the NJV of works with the word “Invalid.” In the same room, works at the same time over the course of depiction in photography and video, but also by two icons of performance artist: Yoko Ono Zayed Malik held his head in a toilet in a work a single evening. Sameera Raja, who runs the choices women artists in Pakistan make and ORLAN. In ONOCHORD, from 2004, Yoko titled We’re All in this Together. Performance Canvas Gallery, told me: in the representation of their own bodies. For Ono appears in a video instructing viewers was not just confined to opening night. On this exhibition, she featured Hurmat ul Ain’s to pick up flashlights placed before her another day of the two-week Biennale, British This is not the first time we’ve presented Great Sacrifice, a 2011 video that shows the projection and signal the words “I love you” in artist Stephen Sheehan stood in front of Frere performance art. We had Amin Gulgee’s artist stitching upon goat testicles. At the a Morse code of her own invention. She states Hall, a colonial building in the heart of the shows [in 2005 and 2015], and we’ve opening in New York, two female students from in the video: “Keep sending the message/ city, with a toy duck at his feet, a yellow life included performance in shows off- Parsons re-enacted the performance. She until the end of the year/and beyond/keep preserver around his waist and an umbrella site, at Mohatta Palace, Frere Hall. also included Ayesha Jatoi’s Clothesline from sending the message/everywhere on the held aloft in the noonday sun. (I recall a We keep on doing this so people are 2006. In this two-channel, four-minute video earth/and to the universe/keep sending.” This young man who was enjoying his day off with aware of performance art, to make it of a live performance, the artist pulls dripping recalls Yoko Ono’s early conceptual actions a couple of friends idly asking me, “What is more mainstream. People have a strong pieces of cloth that have been dyed red from a which consisted of a set of proposals that the he doing? This is something new for me.”) reaction, either for or against. Mostly plastic bucket and drapes them on the wings participant could undertake. (Many of these Later in the performance programme, British they react against it because they don’t of a fighter plane installed on a roundabout appear in her book, Grapefruit, first published artist Amy Kingsmill stood in the gallery of the understand it. But it’s never met with in Lahore. Also on view was Meher Javed’s in Tokyo in 1964, including, among many Alliance Française de Karachi and bled over a indifference, which is a good thing.4 Air Hunger. In this 16-minute video from 2008 others, Painting for the Wind from 1962, which bouquet of white roses. The work, excruciating the artist breathes through a pair of freshly instructs: “Make a hole. Leave it in the wind.”3) to watch, took 20 minutes. By the end of it, the On October 6, 2018, Natasha Jozi curated slaughtered goat lungs which are attached to Also on view were photographs from ORLAN’s roses had been colored a vibrant red by her “Body Becoming” at House, which she a tube and a mask strapped to her face while hybridization series; in these she juxtaposed blood. founded in Lahore in 2017 to explore and counting her breaths with a hand-held clicking her own face with pre-Columbian and African support performative arts. House also hosts device. features. This series references ORLAN’s body a residency program. The one-day event 22 presented durational performances alongside And on March 15, 2020, Amin Gulgee Performance art, while gaining ground, is still for centuries in South Asia. Zarmeene Shah, a sequential program of shorter works. The and Sara Pagganwala co-curated “Lal Jadoo” a new discipline in Pakistan. It is engaging who heads the Liberal Arts Programme at IVS, artists included Hamna Khalid, Maha Sohail, as part of the Second International Public an increasing number of artists. Although noted: Nayab Naveed, Haider Shah, Abrar Ahmed, Art Festival in Karachi. The two-hour group a handful of artists dedicate themselves Ahmed Khan, Ajiya Asif, Arsalan Afzal, Waleed exhibition of performance streamed from exclusively to performance, for most it is an There is still not a clear understanding Sajid, Aisha Suria and Kanwal Tariq. Karachi House, a semi-abandoned office extension of other, formal practices. They see here of the difference between On May 13, 2019, Amin Gulgee curated building on I.I. Chundrigar, the main artery it as a way to say things they cannot in other performance and the performing arts. “One Night Stand/Coup d’un soir” at the Cité of the city’s financial district. In this unlikely mediums. Amin Gulgee observed: Performance hasn’t evolved here as it internationale des Arts in Paris. This was an location, 65 performance works by Pakistani did in the West. You can’t discount street exhibition/happening of 32 simultaneous artists were presented, 43 of which were live Performance art’s advantage is that it is theatre and dance and our own narrative performances by artists from Pakistan as well and happened concurrently while the other 22 ephemeral. You can tackle challenging traditions when considering performance as France, Iran, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, were photographs and videos of performances issues. It’s up to the audience to decide art in our context. We’re somewhere in- Mauritius, the Democratic Republic of the done in the past, including Salima Hashmi’s if this art communicates or not. Having between. We also don’t have the support Congo, Finland, Egypt and Montenegro. The Handa Hubalna and Ayesha Jatoi’s Clothesline. curated shows of performance art mechanisms that they have in the West. show was the culmination of his two-month Gulgee wrote in his curatorial note: “My there seems to me to be interest and We don’t have the Guggenheim, we residency at the Cité. He wrote in his curatorial co-curator Sara Pagganwala and I decided excitement about it among the Karachi don’t have MoMA. There is, however, essay for the accompanying catalogue: that our interventions would be minimal for audience. It becomes an area for an openness to performance at art our installation; we wanted Karachi House dialogue.8 institutions like the IVS and the NCA. We “One Night Stand / Coup d’un soir” was to retain its ghosts and memories of the need to give performance art some time 10 a journey without a destination. It began past.”6 However, on March 14th, because of It’s not just the wider Pakistani audience that to develop. in the outside courtyard of the Cite, went the spread of the Coronavirus, public events is grappling with performance art; it’s critics into the reception and then down a spiral were cancelled in Karachi’s home province of as well. As Niilofur Farrukh, CEO and Managing While still controversial, performance art in staircase and onto a long corridor that Sindh. Gulgee and Pagganwala agreed that Trustee of the Karachi Biennale, stated: Pakistan is increasingly being practiced and led to an auditorium. One had to traverse “Lal Jadoo” would be closed to the public and discussed. The next decade should prove as the same path in order to exit. All the viewed on live feed instead. How critics here look at it depends upon pivotal as the last for its formation. On August performances happened simultaneously “The Trojan Donkey,” which took place their exposure to it. If they have seen a lot 8th, 2020, during a webinar organized by Amin within a period of 70 minutes. I wanted the following month at the height of the of performance art, they will have a deeper Gulgee and Sara Pagganwala to discuss the the evening to be an experiential one, in global lockdown, was conceived as a virtual insight into it. Generally speaking, they are launch of the e-catalogue for “Lal Jadoo” and which all five senses (sight, hearing, smell, happening. From their base in Karachi, co- not engaging with it in any big way. The performance art in Pakistan in general, Salima taste and touch) were accessed. The site curators Amin Gulgee, Sara Pagganwala and same was true when video began here; Hashmi stated: “Right now is the time when of the show itself was unconventional: Adam Fahy-Majeed asked artists from around critics were not seriously looking at it.9 the sounds of silence are absolutely all around This non-white cube became a labyrinth the globe to submit performance works us. I think this is the time when perhaps this is congested with performing bodies. I captured in video form for the exhibition. Most Another challenge is that, in Pakistan, there is the art form that we should all look at.” deliberately provided no guidance to the were pre-recorded; some were viewed in real still confusion as to what what differentiates audience, either written or oral. They had time. The curators uploaded these works onto performance art from the performing arts. 7 to rely upon their “sixth sense” of intuition a Facebook page that went live at 9:18 pm After all, traditions of theatre, music, poetic A version of this article first appeared in the November 2018 to make sense of it all.5 (PST) on April, 25, 2020. recitation, storytelling and dance have existed issue of The Herald. 24 Endnotes 1 Zarmeene Shah, “Whatever the Dream May Be” in Dreamscape (Karachi, 2014). 2 https://www.kbcuratorial.com 3 Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970). 4 Sameera Raja, transcribed phone interview, October, 2018. 5 Amin Gulgee, “A Journey Without a Destination/ Un voyage sans destination” in One Night Stand/ Coup d’un soir (Karachi, 2019), 12. 6 Amin Gulgee, “Love, Death and Prophecy” in Lal Jadoo (Karachi, 2020), 11. 7 https://www.facebook.com/TheTrojanDonkey/. 8 Amin Gulgee, in discussion with the author, October, 2018. 9 Niilofur Farrukh, transcribed phone interview, October, 2018. 10 Zarmeene Shah, transcribed phone interview, October, 2018.

26 THE TROJAN DONKEY

28 A chorus in the context of Ancient Greek not for the engineers who hid the recordings to sign the petition against mortality. ORLAN’s CHORUS tragedy, comedy, satyr plays – and modern for their own personal enjoyment. emotional oscillation is juxtaposed against works inspired by them – is a homogeneous, The notion of humour as a vehicle the constant negation of the monosyllabic non-individualised group of performers, for choral commentary is reinforced by machine. who comment with a collective voice on Max Papeschi’s music video for the song, In a divergent configuration of a the dramatic action. However, the chorus ‘It’s All Devo’. This is clear from the song’s chorus, Sheema Kermani’s And Still We Rise! in Elizabethan theatre typically consisted opening line, ‘I don’t want to be part of the decries against death and war, documenting of one single character, on stage mostly new world order’. The video is comprised of the choreography of Tehrik-e-Niswan (the dressed in black, who was used for narrative composite, animated iconography referencing women’s movement), her cultural action purposes. Combining both definitions, we meme culture that darkly satirises the group. This performance combined multimedia have interpreted chorus as a typology of interrelationship between the political/ images of conflict and destruction in the performative commentary. military/capitalist establishments. Middle-East, with human movement. The The Raqs Media Collective responded The Trumpian imagery pervading uprising expressed by the rebellious dancing to our formulation of The Trojan Donkey by Papeschi’s video work appears “in the bodies struggles against this morbid imagery. building a discourse from George Orwell’s flesh” in Alana Victoria Hunt’s With these Animal Farm. One of the three members of two hands. The piece is formed solely by the (AG/AFM) the collective, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, gesticulations of Trump’s hands during his expounded on the character of Benjamin, the presidential inauguration speech. Although the donkey in this allegorical novella. In front of video is silent, there is no doubt as to whom a projected image of a South Asian donkey, the famous hands belong to. Sengupta comments on Benjamin’s mode of A critique of power structures frames Gandhian protest, in which the donkey refuses Mithu Sen’s, How to be a SUCKcessful Artist. to participate in the farm’s activities, citing age Targeting the global art system in the form of and frailty. Thus, the donkey disengages from didactic points, it ironically responded to the the dystopic system that has formed around proposition: ‘How to maximise your impact him. as a female artist from the global South’. With Subversion is conspicuous in the her warped hand movements, Sen proclaims documentation of Salima Hashmi’s iconic, in an incomprehensible language as a satirical skit, ‘How to Boil an Egg’, which manifesto-type text rolls behind her. Two of originally aired as part of a sketch comedy its points include: ‘Be avant-garde narcotic programme on PTV in the early 1970’s. Hashmi post-colonial’; and, ‘Name your practicing says of the work: ‘I was part of a team that #Resistance and create alternative discourse’. believed in satire as a form of critique that In an aggressive petition against death, invited our communities into moments of ORLAN addresses the audience, shouting: ‘for self-reflection, and possible shared hopes thousands of years nobody has ever asked of the future’. This footage would have been our opinion’. Intermittently, she laughs in a destroyed by the censorship of Zia’s regime, if disconcerting manner, whilst a robot seems 30 Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) (founded 1992, New Delhi, India)

Raqs’ Trojan Donkey (2020) 1:47 minutes New Delhi, India

32 Raqs’ Trojan Donkey June 2020

It’s always all about energy. Benjamin, the donkey, stays aloof, through everything. His remark, “Windmill or no It could be a coal mine, it could be a nuclear windmill, life would go on as it had always gone reactor, it could be a thermal power plant, it on – that is, badly,” could in a sense have could be an oil field, or even a windmill farm. something to do with the fact that he was too It’s always all about energy. old to be moved even by the whirlwind of a windmill. The most important thing that happens on “Animal Farm” has to do with the building of a Like he said, “Donkeys live a long time. None of windmill. you has ever seen a dead donkey”.

It is one pig’s obsession and another pig’s Boxer the horse, the good-natured worker who tactical ploy. did as he was told to, had only one thing to say, no matter what happened, “I will work harder”. Snowball, the windmill enthusiast, is ousted from the farm by Napoleon the windmill What happens if you cross a sceptical donkey sceptic on the grounds that the machine is an with the Stakhanovite horse? enormous distraction from matters that need more urgent attention, like the growing of food. Do you get a cynical, workaholic mule?

But once Snowball is out of the scene, Or do you end up with a mule standing at Napoleon takes to the windmill as if it were his cross-purposes to itself underneath a lazy own idea. And everyone has to work for the windmill? A Trojan Donkey? windmill, and the windmill alone.

And “Animal Farm”, the socialist utopia, becomes a forced labour camp.

© Raqs Media Collective 2020 34 Salima Hashmi (b. 1942, Delhi, India)

Handa Hubaalna (1972) 3:14 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

36 Max Papeschi (b. 1970, Milan, Italy)

It’s All Devo (2016) 3:31 minutes Milan, Italy

38 It’s All Devo

WELL I DON’T WANNA BE PART OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER

WELL I DON’T WANNA SEE DON’T WANNA SEE DRONES BUZZIN EVERY CORNER

JUST GIVE ME A PASS THROW ME SOME ROPE LET ME HANG MYSELF PLEASE LET ME GO JUST GIVE ME A BREAK CAUSE I ALREADY KNOW THE SECRETS YOU KEEP I GOOGLED YOUR SHOW

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH NO NO NO WE DID IT AGAIN WE DID IT AGAIN YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH NO NO NO IT’S ALL DEVO IT’S ALLLLLLLLLL DE-VOOOOOOO

WELL I DON’T WANNA CHOKE ON A MASTER PLAN THAT’S BROKEN AND I DON’T WANNA DRINK Devo’s Gerald Casale - “It’s All Devo” - 2016 Directed By Max Papeschi and Maurizio Temporin DON’T WANNA DRINK Music By Devo’s Gerald Casale ANY MORE OF THE POPULAR POISON With Italy’s Phunk Investigation

40 42 Alana Victoria Hunt (b. 1984, Sydney, Australia)

With these two hands (2017) 5:32 minutes Miriwoong Country Australia

44 46 Mithu Sen (b. 1971, Burdwan, India)

How to be a SUCKcessful Artist (2019) 1:12 minutes New Delhi, India

48 50 ORLAN (b. 1947, Saint-Étienne, France)

Pétition contre la mort (2018) 2:39 minutes Paris, France

52 Pétition contre la mort FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS JE NE VEUX PAS QUE MA FAMILLE MEURE ENSEMBLE ENSEMBLE ENSEMBLE DEPUIS DES MILLÉNAIRES WE MUST RESPOND I DON’T WANT TO NOUS DEVONS RÉAGIR WE HAVE NEVER BEEN - ASKED FOR - OUR - JE NE VEUX PAS OPINION I DON’T WANT MY CHILDREN TO DIE ENOUGH NO AHAHAHAH ON NOUS A JAMAIS - DEMANDÉ - NOTRE - AVIS JE NE VEUX PAS QUE MES ENFANTS MEURENT ASSEZ NO AHAHAHAH I DON’T WANT TO ENOUGH NO OUHOUHOUHOUAHAH ENOUGH JE NE VEUX PAS ASSEZ NO OUHOUHOUHOUAHAH ASSEZ I DON’T WANT MY FRIENDS TO DIE NO JE NE VEUX PAS QUE MES AMIS MEURENT LIFE WON’T BE A KILLER ANYMORE NO I DON’T WANT TO LA VIE NE SERA PLUS UN TUEUR JE NE VEUX PAS ENOUGH LIFE WON’T BE A SERIAL KILLER ANYMORE NO ONE EVER ASKED FOR OUR OPINION ASSEZ LA VIE NE SERA PLUS UN SERIAL KILLER ON NOUS A JAMAIS DEMANDÉ NOTRE AVIS IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR TOO LOOOOONG I DON’T WANT TO IL Y A TROP LONGTEMPS QUE ÇA DUUUUURE JE NE VEUX PAS SIGN THIS PETITION HAVE YOU BEEN ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION? FOR TOO LOOOONG SIGNEZ CETTE PÉTITION ON VOUS A DEMANDÉ VOTRE AVIS? QUE ÇA DUUUURE I WANT LIFEEE DO YOU WANT TO DIE? DO YOU WANT TO DIE? FOR TOO LOOOONG JE VEUX LA VIIIE EST CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? EST CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? QUE ÇA DUUUURE LIFEEE DO YOU WANT TO DIE? IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR TOO LOOOOONG LA VIIE EST CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? NO IL Y A TROP LONGTEMPS IL Y A TROP LIFEEE NO LONGTEMPS LA VIIE NO ENOUGH FOR TOO LOOOONG I WANT LIFEEE NO ASSEZ QUE ÇA DUUUURE JE VEUX LA VIIIIIIIIE ENOUGH NO FOR TOO LOOOONG ASSEZ NO QUE ÇA DUUUURE DO YOU WANT TO DIE? ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH EST CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? ASSEZ ASSEZ ASSEZ IF YOU ARE LIKE ME DO YOU WANT TO DIE? ENOUGH SI VOUS ÊTES COMME MOI EST CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? ASSEZ IT HAS TO STOP SIGN THIS PETITION I DON’T WANT TO ENOUGH ÇA DOIT S’ARRETER SIGNEZ CETTE PÉTITION JE NE VEUX PAS ASSEZ FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS ENOUGH AHAHAH DEPUIS DES MILLÉNAIRES ASSEZ SIGN THIS PETITION AHAHAH FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS SIGNEZ CETTE PÉTITION DEPUIS DES MILLÉNAIRES I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO WE MUST RESPOND DO YOU WANT TO DIE? FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS JE NE VEUX PAS JE NE VEUX PAS NOUS DEVONS RÉAGIR EST-CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? DEPUIS DES MILLÉNAIRES I DON’T WANT MY FAMILY TO DIE TOGETHER TOGETHER TOGETHER DO YOU WANT TO DIE? 54 EST-CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR? DO YOU WANT TO DIE? EST-CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR?

I DON’T WANT TO JE NE VEUX PAS I DON’T WANT TO I DON’T WANT TO JE NE VEUX PAS JE NE VEUX PAS

ENOUGH ASSEZ ENOUGH ASSEZ AHAHAH AHAHAH

ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH

DO YOU WANT TO DIE? EST-CE QUE VOUS VOULEZ MOURIR ? I DON’T WANT TO JE NE VEUX PAS AHAHAHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAHA

© ORLAN 2018 56 Sheema Kermani (b. 1951, Karachi, Pakistan)

And Still We Rise! (2015) 2:32 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

58 60 A soliloquy is an act of speaking thoughts ascendancy of the British Raj in India, and SOLILOQUY aloud when alone or regardless of any hearers, its utilisation of conspiracies to divide and especially by a character in a play. It is often a conquer. derivative form of recitation, which in a general Lionel Manga’s Déambulation was a sense, is the act of performing verse or other performative ‘perambulation’. The writer/ writing before an audience. Poetry and prose critic wanders through a labyrinthine local become a performative mode, giving the marketplace in Douala (Cameroon) reciting the written medium an oral and visual expression. poetry of the renowned Congolese playwright These personal orations give us a privileged and novelist, Sony Labou Tansi, who died in insight into the internal perspective of the 1994 due to the HIV pandemic. Manga states artist. of Tansi’s ‘L’Acte de respirer’ (‘The Act of Filmmaker and poet Laurence Hugues breathing’) from which he reads: ‘these words in, Hope tastes like a cherry tomato, recites her are now looking somehow quite prophetic.’ poem of the same name, whilst an image of Poet and professor Connie Voisine, a fragile seedling in a cup is projected upon performed her poem ‘Anonymous Lyric’, with the wall of a neighbouring building in Lyon. a homemade mask obscuring her mouth and Hugues’ poem hybridises the poetic structure nose. The resultant anonymity of the poet of a Japanese haiku and an Afghan landay. juxtaposed the fecund imagery of her partially In French, it begins: ‘Waiting for Athena/I’ve muffled words. Exploring memory of another started filing my nails/a heron passes over’. time, it commenced with: ‘It was the summer Transcultural dialogue is similarly of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down./It expressed in Abi Tariq’s After Thought. Tariq broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk.’ is seated in a living room with a selection of Valentinas Klimašauskas reads the poem fiction and non-fiction by Eastern and Western ‘Influences’ by Aidas Marčėnas, in Lithuanian, authors piled in front of him, including H.M. whilst in his kitchen overlooking the forest and Naqvi’s The Selected Works of Abdullah the firewood of a rural setting. Sporting a baseball Cossack, Homeboy; and John Dewey’s Art cap, the writer/curator transmitted his love for as Experience, amongst others. The artist the lyrical beauty of the Lithuanian language, connected sentences and phrases from as captured by Marčėnas’ poetry. these texts, thus constructing a continuous An oblique form of silent soliloquy monologue. emerged from Sehrish Willayat’s Dear God. Meher Afroz raises the problematics of The artist – dressed as a little girl with her cultural influence in her work, Taus Chaman hair tied in a pink bow – naively writes a letter ki Mynah. Afroz narrated her own re-telling to God. We are voyeuristically placed in the of Parizad or Parindey (‘Fairies and Birds’), author’s point of view, and hence given access accompanied by imagery appropriated from a to the epistolary expression of her internal 19th Century painting in a Lucknow Nawab’s monologue. (AG/AFM) collection. Her narration describes the 62 Laurence Hugues (b. 1967, Champagne, France)

Hope tastes like a cherry tomato (2020) 1:42 minutes Lyon, France

64 L’espoir a le goût d’une tomate cerise Hope tastes like a cherry tomato

en attendant Athéna waiting for Athena je me suis fait les ongles i’ve started filing my nails un héron passe a heron passes over dessous ses ailes below its wings les algues bleues du fleuve the blue algae of the river comme une traîne like a train peindre à distance to paint from distance des vues qu’on ne verra pas sightseeings that one will not see le pommier blanc the white apple tree le son du ciel the sound of the sky quand l’enfant lance sa balle when a child throws a ball un drone par terre a drone on the ground mes doigts sur ta peau my fingers on your skin les fourmis sur la vitre the ants on the window glass le soleil, encore the sun, again

© Laurence Hugues 2020

66 Abi Tariq (b. 1990, Karachi, Pakistan)

After Thought (2020) 7:00 minutes Paris, France

68 After Thought typical work everyday life Pashtun wellbeing storeyed primitive art churchyard miracle your wounds are your eyes communication is the message summer you believed in a relentless cutting down of Intended to move doubted myself- afraid intrusion the unnecessary Modern art critique of western but the child careful note- sometimes unfriendly put it another way- these men were the fixed formula accepted society came upon settled foaming- reddish hair forerunners of other poets. western art - 20th century the forest. innocent witch- born deceiver union ignoring fellow inspirations- unbelievable Intrinsically speaking, even the volcano’s offends its relation against 82 But tell me my friend, and yet…strike- lovely- head- sometimes outburst, dabble how it started arriving there many have all that has seized strangely escape eloquent tempter. every particular work of art allows even Kandinsky. has stared straight is undefined, pervasive- from time to time democracy- found- forged- robes- humility sooner or later Artistic literature back at feminine. Elegance. affirmation the butchers house new spirit taking a small revenge . we get flustered Form- translation- trust- theories major artists signaled Cubism when we encounter the truth chance- moon- Karachi plastic continuity The dominant spirit of our epoch motherfucker A man does not today’s speech one must is disturbingly easy- awarding a victory Combining footage into a single action- Nani abandon the suffering of a man. or quite simply- jealousy. i’m fascinated by such incidents! practice : Life : thinking to be whispered Probably loose most of their significance inches- idiots- Russian- small group of importance It had been about two years since you last had once normal life is restored. Home : Baba. truth is the assertion a real conversation. - alternative form of community - Tub of water- standard operating procedute these spheres immediately represent The emotion of affection that operates not But Apa! school- drank- reader more or less human figure through an overt act of caress …concentrating bomblast. essential qualities, fleeting sensations but by desire and returning- feelings arise in him inches- yellow kameez- onto the bus. tendency- mediums- motive slowly stopping- constantly- that would not mean constructing agencies before he died his life-span, too little, Shape- point out painter- restoration. definitions remarked Idea, enclosing, repeating There is a difference between the failure of repetition - identical - activity useful Abi Tariq - After Thought (2020) : A live cut-up reading performance from: T H I S multiply - thermodynamics - others try to avoid Art and Theory 1900-2000 - Charles Harrison & Paul Wood compelling — the way in which i move — regarded as true Art as Experience - John Dewey Narcissus & Goldmund - Hermann Hesse poem. normal within The Hatred of Poetry - Ben Lerner irreversibility. synchronize the times of fields when you read Death in Venice and Other Short Stories - Thomas Mann The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris - Leïla Marouane A kind of effect, defined by specific strategy employed which you do The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack - H.M. Naqvi did the avant-garde- Realism. unintended whole. takes a form Home Boy - H.M. Naqvi Sited Body, Public Visions - Ernesto Pujol Great art is never extreme! who said they’re How to Live Together - Koki Tanaka we disembark outside a narrow gray four- relying solely The Scatter Here Is Too Great - Bilal Tanweer 70 Meher Afroz (b. 1948, Lucknow, India)

Taus Chaman ki Mynah (2020) 5:12 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

72 74 © Meher Afroz 2020 76 Lionel Manga (b. 1955, Dschang, Western Cameroon)

Déambulation (2020) 8:21 minutes Douala, Cameroon

78 L’Acte de Respirer titre d’exemple. En cela il est différent de l’homme qui s’improvise en improvisant Nous avons vidé la vie à coups de questions : l’univers. En posant l’acte d’exister, il échappe qui on est - où on est - où va-t-on… délicieusement au terrorisme de respirer. Il À toutes ces questions je donne une réponse, crée ce corps-langage où son âme vente. mais pour l’accepter, il faut avoir le courage, Ce monde-langage, pourquoi pas ? Il arrive à je dirai même le culot d’exister. Au fond, si épingler l’univers au fond de son émotion. Et vraiment vide il y a, pourquoi ne pas en profiter quand le vulgaire déclare : « On ne vit qu’une pour y mettre quelque chose ? Pourquoi ne fois » -il éclat : impuissant ! pas l’utiliser à exister ? L’homme est trop beau Maintenant, qui est poète et qui ne l’est pas ? pour qu’on le néglige. Je crois humblement que tout homme est Cependant ne vous abusez pas. Je ne parlerai poète, qui accepte de traverser la vie par cet jamais du petit collectionneur de plaisirs, ni du endroit qu’on nomme « mention homme ». petit vendeur de situations, ni du monteur de L’écrivain de la poésie devient donc un traître. vins, ni du caissier d’opinions, ni du brouteur Traître au sublime. Traître au naturel. Traître à la de positions, ni de l’émondeur de slogans, ni beauté. Mais l’acte de respirer n’est sûrement de la petite machine à calculer les races. Je pas une forme quelconque d’écriture. C’est, ne parlerai jamais du truand esthétique, ni du on dirait, la douleur d’une âme qui vient cochon idéologique, ni du délinquant culturel, d’accoucher des dimensions exactes de ni du drogué linguiste, ni du débauché tiers- l’univers. J’oblige les choses à exister et elles mondisant. Je ne parlerai pas du candidat au obéissent délicieusement. Vous croyez peut- néant - je parle du volontaire. Volontaire parce être que c’est chose facile de régler une fois qu’en fin de compte la mention d’humain pour toutes le différent homme-univers, de est tellement crasseuse qu’elle n’appartient résoudre l’équation matière-inhabité ? qu’aux volontaires. Maintenant, est-ce que cela me donne ce Volontaire à la condition d’homme. Qui qu’on appelle du mérite ? Je ne crois pas. J’ai veut ? Mais surtout : qui dit mieux ? Les simplement eu le culot d’exister ; Pourquoi révolutionnaires ont échoué et leur échec voulez-vous que cela s’appelle mérite ? est plus cuisant que celui des saligauds en Entêtement. Non. L’entêtement n’est pas un titre. Les bourgeois ont échoué comme des mérite. Et je m’entête à nommer la vie - Je hommes, les révolutionnaires ont échoué m’entête à trouer la vie. comme des dieux ? Poète, dira-t-on. Mais le poète qu’a-t-il de plus que les autres sinon son entêtement ? Il se nomme à traverser la vie là où la viande Sony Labou Tansi est ferme. Il se désigne à puiser les choses L’Acte de Respirer, version 2, Revue Noire Editions, dans leur nom. Bref, il parle et respire à Paris 2005 80 82 Connie Voisine (b. 1964, Fort Kent, ME, USA)

Anonymous Lyric (2020) 2:02 minutes Las Cruces, NM, USA

84 Anonymous Lyric

It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down. I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans.

It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk. It must be the Night Fever, I sang with the 8-track.

The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon on my was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door, oblivious siblings. tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . . A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind. and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn. A gush of yolk and then darker. I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms. Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala— vinyl seats, the rear-view, I shall say what inordinate love is. headrests and you, your hand through your hair. The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.

An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.

Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander.

Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must.

Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother.

That girl was shining me on.

Connie Voisine, “Anonymous Lyric” from Rare High Meadow of Which I Might In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of Dream. my room. Copyright © 2008 by Connie Voisine.

86 Valentinas Klimašauskas (b. 1977, Kaunas, Lithuania)

Untitled (2020) 1:04 minutes Kaunas, Lithuania

88 Įtakos

man darė įtaką lietus ir jaunas buninas, ir vėjas, ir šventas jonas – du kartus, ir tris kartus – šviesos kūrėjas ir keturis kartus kadai, o ne, penkis – tarkovskio kinas, ir kokį trisdešimt – baltai kasmet pražystantis jazminas kelis kartus, sakykim mūzos, bet daug dažniau – mėlynė, guzas ir daugel panašių dalykų iliuzijos, pegasų karčiai, ir vieną sykį – šitas karčiai saldus gyvenimas už dyką

1999 06 25 Marčėnas, Aidas. Dėvėti: Eilėraščiai. – Vilnius: LRS leidykla, 2001.

90 Sehrish Willayat (b. 1992, Karachi, Pakistan)

Dear God (2020) 6:11 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

92 An enclosure can refer to an area that is awkwardly navigates this narrow aperture, in performance completely entangled in the tube ENCLOSURE surrounded by barriers, or a state of being. an enactment that seems incongruous with of the vacuum cleaner, encased in the sensory At the time of The Trojan Donkey, we were the suburban setting. Perhaps, this alludes to homeliness of the bubble. collectively experiencing a required social the very first human enclosure – the womb – isolation in the paradigm of global lockdown. and the act of entering and exiting it. (AG/AFM) Humanity, in forced separation, was both Maha Minaj, bracketed in a narrow spatially and socially confined. space by two white walls and a curtain, moves Syed Danish Raza’s video work, The around a chair; at times underneath it, and Age of Cages, contains oneiric imagery of his at others, using it as a support to climb the brother’s empty bird cages, with a melancholic walls. It emoted a sense of absence, which soundtrack overlaid by the artist’s voice is reinforced by the title Thinking About You. reciting his Urdu poem, ‘Umeed ki Kirne’ (‘Rays This silent video illustrates the claustrophobic of Hope’), along with birdsong. One can feel stasis of separation the sense of entrapment and claustrophobia in On the other hand, Noor Ahmed – this dark space. dressed in white, with flowers adorning her Isolation is apparent in, performance hair – seemed to embody a tranquillity that render 2, in which Talal Faisal – denied of comes with meditative solitude. In Breathe internet – plays an endless video game. Given With Me, Ahmed sits cross-legged on a the nature of our times, the internet became bathroom floor, with a large crystal balanced our only form of access and communication on her knee, encapsulating equilibrium in her with the wider world around us, accentuating quarantine. a double enclosure that the expressionless Zulfikar Ali Bhutto caressed a white wall Faisal is confined within. with his entire body. Remaining attached to Ali Samoo, in the Pakistani city it throughout, there is a sensuous intimacy of Hyderabad, piled bricks amongst the with the boundary. With Bhutto’s back mostly surrounding detritus, thereby separating to the camera, there is a private lyricism himself from the audience with this with which the artist moves his body. The rudimentary wall. Samoo states of the title, Art?, questions the multifaceted idea of work, which speaks to the experiences of containment and being pigeon-holed. marginalised labourers: ‘I use bricks and a Tazeen Qayyum began her live space that appears to be abandoned to show performance by touching the walls of her how these communities are hidden away from bubble-like enclosure, situated in her front city centres and spaces of interaction.’ garden. The synthetic bubble is furnished with In Climbing Out the Window of My an assortment of objects: books; a teapot; a Mother’s Car, Stephen Sheehan entered, vacuum cleaner; and plants, amongst other then crawled in and out of his mother’s small things. She picks one object at a time, rubbing car in Birkenhead, England. His large body it lovingly with her face and body, ending the 94 Syed Danish Raza (b. 1973, Karachi, Pakistan)

The Age of Cages (2020) 3:46 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

96 98 Talal Faisal (b. 1992, Karachi, Pakistan) performance render 2 (2020) 7:00 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

100 Ali Abdul Karim Samoo (b. 1999, Matiari, Pakistan)

Hidden Labour (2020) 3:09 minutes Hyderabad, Pakistan

102 104 Stephen Sheehan (b. 1986, Birkenhead, England)

Climbing Out the Window of My Mother’s Car (2020) 4:33 minutes Birkenhead, England

106 108 Maha Minhaj (b. 1993, Karachi, Pakistan)

Thinking About You (2020) 7:24 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

110 112 Noor Ahmed (b. 1994 Karachi, Pakistan)

Breathe with Me (2020) 1:11 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

114 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (b. 1990, Damascus, Syria)

Art? (2020) 6:26 minutes San Francisco, CA, USA

116 118 Tazeen Qayyum (b. 1973, Karachi, Pakistan)

Fourteen (2020) 7:04 minutes Toronto, Canada

120 122 With an absence of free movement, we ongoing significance for maintaining cultural – constructed a fictional narrative around HABITAT were drawn into analysing our own contexts. memory. the habitat of fishermen in Karachi. This Suddenly, we were forced to augment the Sebastián Díaz Morales celebrates is an oblique critique of hyper-capitalist awareness of our abodes – the places and the architecture of Buenos Aires. His video exploitation of the internet, by infusing the conditions in which we live – and how work, Pasajes I, depicts a continuous, imagery of the local fishermen with advertising it relates to our place in the world. This monochromatic montage of a man opening banners from a specific mobile company. Yet understanding is inherently interconnected and closing doors, whilst passing through it somehow presaged the necessity of virtual with our memories and cultural narratives. variegated spatial contexts in the city. This communication in the contemporary moment, In gestures of, Alana Victoria Hunt expresses the notion of the city as a fluid, along with its profit-based potential. poetically documented her quotidian transitional space. existence in Miriwoong country in outback Similarly interacting with urban (AG/AFM) North-Western Australia. The laconic imagery architecture, Eemaan Raja’s I seek thee has is periodically disrupted by single words, an austere quality. The performative agents such as: violence; flight; care; education; and reflected sunlight onto exterior surfaces – chance, in dialogue with the experience of from within and without. Rather than doors, those who inhabit the concomitant beauty and however, Raja uses windows as a threshold to desolation of the outback. the city. Richard Humann’s work, Caged, situated Rumana Hussain’s quarantine space, the viewer within his sequestered habitat in in American suburbia, becomes the stage Woodstock, upstate New York. This allowed for her untitled performance piece. With us entry into Humann’s daily ritual during dupattas (scarves) tied together as a rope, lockdown. The screen is bifurcated with a Hussain attached herself to a tree in her son’s constant close-up of a ticking clock on one yard, ceremonially venerating a source of side, and images of his routine both in his the natural in the urban. The artist grounded internal and external environment. Caged pays herself to the environment using South Asian homage to John Cage’s famous work 4’33”, textiles, addressing diasporic belonging. which premiered in 1952 at the Maverick Bejamin Daman’s Une quarantaine Concert Hall, within walking distance from européenne romantique gave us a glimpse Humann’s home. into his lockdown experience with his friends Marvi Mazhar’s Fabrication of Space, is a in Monaco. In their multilingual recitation of form of documentation centring on her urban Shakespeare, they casually allow us to witness landscape. In the architect’s video work, a their friendship and affection, in the familiar white sheet is flowing in front of an unnamed setting of a living room. Simultaneously, this heritage building in Karachi, whilst life goes emphasised a certain Eurozone cultural on around it. Mazhar brings much-needed hybridity. attention to the preservation of the past within Virgile Fraisse’s video work, States this metropolis’ urban environment, and its Ø States – created prior to the pandemic 124 Alana Victoria Hunt (b. 1984, Sydney, Australia) gestures of (2020) 2:37 minutes Miriwoong Country, Australia

126 128 130 Richard Humann (b. 1961, Suffern, NY, USA)

Caged (2020) 4:33 minutes Woodstock, NY, USA

132 134 Marvi Mazhar (b. 1984, Karachi, Pakistan)

Fabrication of the Space (2020) 5:31 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

136 138 Sebastián Díaz Morales (b. 1975, Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina)

Pasajes I (2012) 12:35 minutes Buenos Aires, Argentina

140 142 144 Eeman Raja (b. 1995, Lahore, Pakistan)

I seek thee (2020) 2:34 minutes Weimar, Germany

146 148 Rumana Husain (b. 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)

Untitled (2020) 3:31 minutes McLean, VA, USA

150 Benjamin Daman (b. 1998, Le Port, Réunion, France)

Une quarantaine européenne romantique (2020) 7:11 minutes Cap d’Ail, France

152 Virgile Fraisse (b. 1990, Paris, France)

States Ø States (2017) 5:00 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

154 156 A ritual is a sequence of activities that can bodies and hair. This was a type of reverent and a mental level. RITUAL comprise gestures, words, actions, or objects, baptism. A divergent form of centring oneself performed in a sequestered place and Antonio Puri performed a ritual is manifested in a relatable manner by according to a set sequence. Rituals can be act that pervades his artistic practice. Muhammad Osama Saeed’s Sequence 01. In informed by the wider culture, or intensely Appearing vulnerable and bare-chested, this work, Saeed walks into his bedroom and private; it is a way of creating order, and whilst he disconcertingly contorts his face in the removes his mask, lighting a cigarette before establishing belonging, it is also a means act of tying rope around it. In this, the artist exhaling deeply. The viewer is allowed into his of differentiating ourselves, or expressing reflects on the ideological ties that arise due private space, and his ritualised relaxation, to individuality. From the magico-religious, to to cultural schemes, ‘which relegate us to an quote Saeed: ‘There is freedom in solitude.’ the routine and ceremonial, rites can manifest existence loaded with paradigms that distort themselves on a collective, or personal level, our communion with life and others.’ (AG/AFM) embodying varying extents of public visibility Vhan Olsen Dombo enacts an and exposure. ambiguous rite. The performance begins with Nirveda Alleck’s video work, The Return, Dombo’s head obscured by a bag, walking seemed to build from South Asian culture in a between two parallel lines, picking up pieces purification of her body. Cloaked in diaphanous of paper and throwing them in the direction white, the Mauritian artist ceremoniously of the viewer. The video ends with Dombo washes a pink shroud in a natural body of violently scrubbing himself with a t-shirt, water. Alleck’s body becomes a symmetrical that he then puts on. Curated by Dominique kaleidoscope that merges with the elements, Malaquais, Parallel Lines is open-ended; it finally disappearing in the water. leads the viewer to question the placement of Muhammad Ali appropriated the the artist within the parameters of the space ceremonial attire of South Asian marriage to and society. critique the endemic imposition of gender Honi Ryan’s contribution documents roles, for his work Knitticism. In the archetypal her performance piece from 2014, Transferal costume of a bridegroom – and with a veil of (Fluid Bodies). In this transference ceremony, flowers across his face – he knits whilst sitting Ryan and her collaborator connect in a on a rocking chair. This is an incongruous devotional manner, pouring water into each juxtaposition of the masculine bridegroom, other’s vessels. This is an intimate exchange with a daily ritual that is considered innately connecting the two collaborators with life- feminine in the social context of Pakistan. giving liquid. In Natasha Jozi’s The scrapers, this Gabrielle Brinsmead is solitary in her ritualistic interaction with nature became untitled work, recording herself stretching a collective action, in the style of a forest- and practicing balletic movements. This based communion. Jozi and her group of is a personal, habitual act of physical self- collaborators used their bare hands and sticks preparation. Brinsmead centres herself with to hollow the earth, with rain cleansing their this routine, which operates on both a physical 158 Nirveda Alleck (b. 1975, New Grove Village, Mauritius)

The Return (2011) 1:53 minutes Ganga Talao, Mauritius

160 162 164 Muhammad Ali (b. 1988, Karachi, Pakistan)

Knitticism (2017) 0:50 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

166 Natasha Jozi (b. 1988, Islamabad, Pakistan)

The scrapers (2019) 4:51 minutes Winnipeg, Canada

168 170 Antonio Puri (b. 1966, Chandigarh, India)

Detaching (2020) 2:22 minutes Bogotá, Colombia

172 174 Vhan Olsen Dombo (b. 1990, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo)

Parallel Lines (2020) From YIF Menga Project 7: 53 minutes With the support of Artist Protection Fund at the Institute of International Education (curated by Dominique Malaquais) Paris, France

176 178 Honi Ryan (b. 1979, Melbourne, Australia)

Transferal: Fluid Bodies (2014) 5:02 minutes From ‘Mindful Encounters with Oliver Vicars-Harris’ Social Sculpture 2013–14 Berlin, Germany

180 Gabrielle Brinsmead (b. 1974, Michigan, USA)

Untitled (2020) 2:51 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

182 Muhammad Osama Saeed (b. 1996, Karachi, Pakistan)

Sequence 01 (2020) 6:51 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

184 186 Oxygen was first produced around 2.7 to 2.8 absurdist breathing mechanism. A darker adulation of interaction with VENTILATION billon years ago by cyanobacteria conducting On the other hand, J & K celebrated nature arises in bankleer’s hedgetalk. A photosynthesis, taking up residence in the the forest as ventilator, in Staying in touch. monologue accompanied Karin Kasböck atmosphere around 2.45 billion years ago.1 Utilising the medium of our times – Zoom – (one of the two members of bankleer), as The earth’s flora has taken on the mantle of the duo conducts an instructional meditation; she entered an enormous hedge at night, the progenitorial microbes, converting light one indoors, and the other in a wooded area. using a flashlight. The text of the narration energy and carbon dioxide into the essential The guidance included phrases such as: ‘You includes the poem, ‘What birds plunge through oxygen for life on our planet. The lungs of the smell the air. You taste the air… You feel the air is not the intimate space’, by Rainer Maria world have been infected by our avaricious caressing your skin.’ This was a profoundly Rilke (1924), which accentuates a tension extractionism, and now, it is our lungs under inward interaction, in which one helped the between the shared air and the claustrophobic attack from a pernicious virus. other to breathe. threshold space of the hedge. A denial of ventilation is embodied Raza Shah and Qamer Abbas reinforced by Lujane Vaqar Pagganwala’s untitled the notion of the forest as a site of connection (AG/AFM) performance. Focussing solely on the in their untitled work. A surreal picnic, Raza mouth, the camera films the artist ingesting uncovers Qamer and they proceed silently glue, encasing her mouth and lips with this to unpack a variety of objects, including: a adhesive. Vaqar Pagganwala attempts to trumpet; a pinecone; an iron, amongst others, breathe with great difficulty through this all the while interacting with a sense of membrane, which not only references our verdant bonding. current respiratory tribulations, but also In a solitary communion with the forest, operates as a feminist critique of a culture of Alexandre Bavard emerges from the trees, silencing. wearing a costume of purple camouflage Similarly struggling to breathe, Faran replete with smock and bush hat. In BOUQUET Qureshi fashions his own ventilation system SAUVAGE, Bavard seems at one with nature, using a plunger. Seated, Qureshi proceeds as he gathers twigs and meanders towards to REMOVE BLOCKAGE, pumping air through and then past the camera. It seemed to his oesophagus like a plumber removing an encapsulate a pilgrimage in the arboreal obstruction from a pipe. The plunger also environment. acts as a vehicle to remove toxins and other We viewed Aida Nosrat’s untitled deleterious substances from the artist’s body. performance through a small round aperture, Batool Zehra equally orchestrates a as she joined birds in song. A practicing situation that emphasises her respiratory musician, Nosrat’s wordless song was capacity. In Before It’s Too Late, the artist’s an exhalation that reverberated deeply hands and arms are duct-taped to the table, throughout the garden that she enters. Like 1. David Biello, ‘The Origin of Oxygen in Earth’s as she exhales air through a straw, creating the song of the birds, Nosrat’s earthy vocals Atmosphere’, Scientific American, August 19, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin- soap bubbles that nebulously cover her face. go beyond language, venerating the natural in of-oxygen-in-atmosphere/. Trapped within this system, Zehra creates an a moment of interconnection. 188 Lujane Vaqar Pagganwala (b. 1997, Karachi, Pakistan)

Untitled (2020) 6:43 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

190 192 Faran Qureshi (b. 1976, Karachi, Pakistan)

REMOVE BLOCKAGE (2020) 1:24 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

194 Batool Zehra (b. 1992, Karachi, Pakistan)

Before It’s Too Late (2020) 5:26 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

196 J&K (Janne Schäfer b. 1976, Darmstdat, Germany and Kristine Agergaard b. 1975, Copenhagen, Denmark)

Staying in touch (2020) 5:38 minutes Berlin, Germany Copenhagen, Denmark

198 200 Raza Shah (b. 1981, Islamabad, Pakistan)

Qamer Abbas (b. 1978, Islamabad, Pakistan)

Untitled (2020) 6:37 minutes Islamabad, Pakistan

202 204 Alexandre Bavard (b. 1987, Paris, France)

BOUQUET SAUVAGE (2020) 3:19 minutes Bourgogne, France

206 Aida Nosrat (b. 1983, Tehran, Iran)

Untitled (2020) 6:51 minutes Yerres, France

208 bankleer (Karin Kasböck and Christoph Maria Leitner) (founded 1999, Berlin, Germany) hedgetalk (2020) 3:59 minutes Berlin, Germany

210 hedgetalk

It is a night of sounds, white noise and sighs What birds plunge through is not the intimate that moves through the great gardens at this space hour. Called upon by the shy rustling of petals in which you see all forms intensified. and leaves fluttered by the air that moves (Out in the Open, you would be denied differently than in wide open rooms or during your self, would disappear into that vastness.) the day when all surveils and all is interfered Space reaches from us and construes the with. world: to know a tree, in its true element, I am no longer this closed room, that has throw inner space around it, from that pure preserved me so well. A wall fell down, and abundance in you. Surround it with restraint. I let soft stems and roots entwine me. An It has no limits. Not till it is held impenetrable wall, which stops the movement in your renouncing is it truly there. of bodies, while goods and funds circulate, so as to cement the dramatic differences in (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1924 Translated by wealth, instead of opening and flowing. It is Stephen Mitchell) hegemonic artistry, to use violence in order to transform something ordinary into something The tree came into the room. And the room is extraordinary. Much violence. the throbbing head. An admirable power, that forces the room to recede, that pushes the And it seems, that nothing moves here, room outside, the entire room outside, so that has ever moved, will ever move. And when all beings can be free in their thinking. This I stir or shift away from this spot, then only power spreads throughout the world equally, incrementally by utmost slowness, as if I were while inwardness deepens. This one room is outside of time, as if I were locked outside of enough for all beings. It seems that one can this room. How others succeed to penetrate remove obstacles and move on. Even hope from both sides? My body starts everywhere builds a room. and ends every where. I can no longer find the beginning. Oh don’t be afraid, not now. And inside, no more borders! The surge of the hedges, it is within.

© bankleer 2020. Voice and translation: Josepha Conrad. The Text includes the poem ‘What birds plunge through is not the intimate space’, Rainer Maria Rilke, 1924 (English translation by Stephen Mitchell). 212 214 The Book of Lamentations is a collection as the collaborator’s living presence was – dressed in period fatigues of the colonial LAMENT of poetic laments for the destruction of removed from sight. army – manipulates dough in a studio space, Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The book (in the Miro Craemer cries out for an absent with a multimedia projection foregrounding his Old Testament and the Hebrew Ketuvim) is love in his performance, YOU. Craemer historical intervention. partly a traditional ‘city lament’ mourning the – dressed in white – rocked backwards Equally referencing colonial invisibility in desertion of the city by God, its destruction, and forwards, and addressed the camera, accounts of the war effort, Mujtaba Asif marks and the ultimate return of the divinity; and seemingly unhinged, repeating, ‘I love you’. a photographic book on the Battle of Britain as partly a funeral dirge in which the bereaved He then proceeds to remove his clothes, an educator. In Evaluating the Answer Script, bewails and addresses the dead. The tone vulnerable in nothing but his underwear, whilst Asif ticks every page, and grading it out of a is bleak: God does not speak, the degree of continuing to make the same proclamation. hundred, eventually awards it full marks. The suffering is presented as overwhelming, and This personal lamentation is reframed artist plays on the position of colonial subject expectations of future redemption are minimal. in Sheema Khan’s video work, Wash your in effusively evaluating an iconic British Today there is a note of Old Testament hands otherwise nature will fix your wagon. The military campaign. punishment in the air, with a plague having camera focuses upon the artist washing her Situated in more recent history, curator been visited upon us. There is much to lament, hands with turquoise soap fashioned in the Carlos Acero Ruiz documented Sun City, to a silent God. However, according to Socrates shape of babies, which gradually disappear Port-au-Prince, during the aftermath of the in The Republic, lamentation is something during the process of cleansing. The vanishing 2010 Haiti earthquake. Filmed from a moving that human beings desire by nature, with babies became a disturbing sacrifice at the vehicle, it speaks of resilience in a context compassion being its active component.2 altar of personal hygiene. of suffering, amplified by the soundtrack; an R.M. Naeem laments the constant Also emerging from the temporality uplifting Catholic chant in Haitian Creole. This static of our contemporary news cycle, which of lockdown, Anne Midgette seems to represents a typology of lament that heals and bombards the individual with human suffering. mourn confinement, with a digital clock gives hope, amidst human tribulations. 7 Unparallel Minutes is a bifurcated video demonstrating the perpetual lapse of piece, comprised of two clocks bracketed by time. In The Witness, we are privileged to (AG/AFM) cherubim. The constantly ticking clocks seem view a kaleidoscopic series of household to symbolise the inevitable march of mortality. interventions and routines, interjected with The soundtrack is cacophonous, with almost artworks that engage Midgette’s attention. At unintelligible news reports amalgamated moments during the video the writer/classical in an overwhelming, multilingual stream of music critic breaks into operatic singing, unbearable sound. imbuing it with a requiem-like quality. Kanwal Tariq, in contrast, presents Lamentation can simultaneously documentation of her melancholic manifest itself in remembrance of past performance work, The Essence of What Fades. suffering. Baptist Coelho’s They agreed to eat In this piece, Tariq buried her collaborator – biscuits and European bread but our regiment reclining on a rectangular block – in clay, in a refused documents a 2019 performance, which personalised type of funeral rite. The silence of was inspired by the food and eating habits of 2. Ronald D. Sigley, Critique of Modernity (Columbia, Mo.: the video accentuates its mournful resonance, Indian soldiers during World War One. Coelho University of Missouri Press, 2011), p. 135. 216 R. M. Naeem (b. 1968, Mirpurkhas, Pakistan)

7 Unparallel Minutes (2020) 7:00 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

218 Kanwal Tariq (b. 1990, Faislabad, Pakistan)

The Essence of What Fades (2018) 1:50 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

220 222 Miro Craemer (b. 1969, Weißenburg/ Bayern, Germany)

YOU (2020) 3:56 minutes Munich, Germany

224 226 Sheema Khan (b. 1982, Karachi, Pakistan)

Wash your hands otherwise nature will fix your wagon (2020) 7:00 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

228 230 Anne Midgette (b. 1965, Portland, OR, USA)

The Witness (2020) 5:20 minutes Washington, DC, USA

232 234 Baptist Coelho (b. 1977, Mumbai, India)

They agreed to eat biscuits and European bread but our regiment refused (2019) 6:41 minutes Paris, France

236 238 Mujtaba Asif (b. 1989, Karachi, Pakistan)

Evaluating the Answer Script (2020) 6:52 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

240 242 Carlos Acero Ruiz (b. 1961, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)

Sun City (2012) 3:49 minutes Port-au-Prince, Haiti

244 Sun City (2012)

You know I can’t lower my arms. I am experiencing misery. Misery I’m going through but you know I can’t lower my arms.

They say you are going to free me. You know I can’t lower my arms. They say that I am not going to unblock but you know that I cannot lower my arms.

Oh god, hosanna. You know I am in battle. I owe money, I can’t pay.

In battle give me victory….... Look at the problems. In battle give me victory. Oh God, Oh God, give me victory.

I confess that I have sinned through thoughts and actions, so I pray to the Virgin Mary for her intercession......

Translated from the Haitian Creole by Olivier Flambert.

246 248 I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the surroundings. on the couch. Eudaemonia is a Greek word E C STA S Y point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire. In contrast to the monochromatic vision This I thought that he thrust several times into my commonly translated as happiness or welfare, heart, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When of Yazdanie, Qinza Najm’s Tabeedli (‘change’) and it is this domestic bliss in which Ali is he drew out the spear he seemed to be drawing is a colourised exaltation of the female form totally immersed. them with it, leaving me all on fire with a wondrous and human movement. Whilst the performers Chris ‘Spud’ Hegarty, in his untitled love for God.3 (St. Teresa of Avila) involved in the choreography were dressed performance, captured the exhilaration in white, graphic patterns and polychromatic of electronic music. The interrelationship In St. Teresa’s description of her ecstatic images were projected onto their bodies as between Spud’s hands and the sonic moment – famously memorialised by Bernini’s they sensuously moved to the disconcerting machinery formed a cyborgic soundscape. It sculpture – the Spanish mystic evokes the soundtrack. The bodies became a kinetic almost seemed as if the ‘DrumBrute’ – with visceral physical reaction to the metaphysical tapestry. its flashing lights and layered ostinatos – took stimulus. Ecstasy (from the Ancient Greek, Emaan Mahmud revelled in her alter- on its own musical voice and visual presence. meaning ‘outside of oneself’) is a subjective ego, Champa, who – along with several other The machine became a conduit to a futuristic experience of total involvement of the of the artist’s characters – form a fictitious realm in which the subject is engulfed by the subject, with an object of their awareness. In group called the Socially Conscious Socialites. sound. classical Greek literature, it refers to removal Mahmud’s crosscut masqueraded as a In Another Flying World, Li Wei was of the mind or body ‘from its normal place of publicity vehicle for a series of imaginary art elevated in a seemingly ecstatic moment, function.’4 magazines featuring Champa and her socially- wavering on a plane above the skyscrapers The act of losing oneself in exaltation conscious posse, in which they flamboyantly and passing cars, subsuming us in the is reflected in the passionate calligraphy pose for the cover. Thus, Mahmud loses reoriented reality of the artist. Floating above of Marco Nereo Rotelli’s Scritte Poetiche herself within the exuberance of her satirical an urban landscape outside Beijing, Li Wei Titoli (‘Written Poetic Titles’). We observe characters. begins the performance upside down, with his the architect from above, using a marker to Sarah Revoltella’s La Nascita di head in a clear bubble. Throughout the course flowingly delineate poetic titles, upon a large- Rivoluzione (‘The Birth of Revolution’) of the time-lapse video, his body is inverted, scale white scroll. The work speaks to the provided a literal representation of the ecstatic whilst he treads the air with his outstretched pronouncement putatively attributed to Plato: moment at the inception of a revolution. Its arms to a “Muzak” version of ‘We are the ‘Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which absurdist theatrics emerged in the birth of World’. Li Wei’s performance was a sardonic manifests itself physically.’ an adult male; the embodiment of revolution. commentary on the global response to the This act of intense marking similarly Revoltella addressed the allegorical character: pandemic. (AG/AFM) emerged in the documentation of Faryal ‘And you Revolution, if you could take power, Yazdanie’s performance, Real and it’s double, what would you do in our place?’ which took place in the French Embassy in Manizhe Ali’s work, EUDAEMONIA, Islamabad in 2018. The artist knelt with her celebrated the joy of motherhood in the time 3. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, ARAS (The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), 2020, https:// face covered in white paint, using her hands of quarantine. In this intimate black and white aras.org/selection_ecstasy.aspx. to create circular forms in charcoal around video, the artist elevated the present moment 4. H. S. Versnal, ‘Ecstasy’, The Oxford Classical Dictionary her body. Through repetitious movements, of connection with her daughter; playing board (3rd revised ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press), Yazdanie seemed to transcend her games, cuddling and stroking her hair lovingly p. 505. 250 Marco Nereo Rotelli (b. 1955, Venice Italy)

Scritte Poetiche Titoli (2019) 2:44 minutes Milan, Italy

252 254 Faryal Yazdanie (b. 1995, Ankara, Turkey)

Real and it’s double (2018) 0:45 minutes Islamabad, Pakistan

256 Qinza Najm (b. 1976, Sargodha, Pakistan)

Tabeedli (2017) 1:56 minutes New York, NY, USA

258 260 262 Emaan Mahmud (b. 1985, Karachi, Pakistan) crosscut (2019) 9:23 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

264 266 Sarah Revoltella (b. 1971, Geneva, Switzerland)

La Nascita di Rivoluzione (2018) 6:30 minutes Rome, Italy

268 270 Manizhe Ali (b. 1972, Lucknow, India)

EUDAEMONIA (2020) 3:18 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

272 274 Chris ‘Spud’ Hegarty (b. 1997, Glasgow, Scotland)

Untitled (2020) 3:45 minutes Glasgow, Scotland

276 Li Wei (b. 1970, Hubei, China)

Another Flying World (2020) 4:07 minutes Yanjiao, China

278 280 META- ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from it was completely submerged under layers creating a surreal landscape out of her own uneasy dreams he found himself transformed of entwinement. Farwa was no longer fully space. in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ This is the human, transmogrified into a disturbing form. Jakob Liebig transforms appropriated MORPHOSIS iconic opening line of Franz Kafka’s novella, André Fernandez revealed the process footage from Der Heilige Berg (1926) a proto- Metamorphosis. Like Samsa, we too woke of becoming the Turbanizer. This Paris- fascist film by Leni Riefenstahl, with its black up with our world abruptly changed. This based musician applied black kohl to his and white imagery running backwards. In process of transformation inherently affects eyes and wound green material around his this “music video”, Liebig’s guitar track us, and in these times, it seemed as if we were head, accompanied by music of his own intermingles with a phrase from Horst caterpillars in our respective cocoons. The composition. The percussive sounds of Seehofer repeated throughout: ‘So often I question is: what will we metamorphose into? the tabla emphasised the transformation say that we are the threshold to paradise. The And what will the brave new world look like? of Fernandez, reinforcing his character holy mountain is paradise.’5 This subverts a We became an insect, a work created construction. dominant narrative of Teutonic progression by Irene Wassner, directly extrapolated Angeline Malik’s time-lapse video by drawing attention to the re-emergence of this insectiferous mutation on the streets entitled, What Mask Do You Wear?, was an latent fascism in the rhetoric of contemporary of Chicago. Wassner sculpted cardboard accelerated masquerade. Sitting on the floor German politics. exoskeletons for herself and her collaborators. of her living room, the actor/director created Transformed, they scurried through the back- multiple masks, holding them in front of her (AG/AFM) alleys and urban street-scape, deserted at face. This was a commentary on our constant night during lockdown. They appeared as adoption of various personas in everyday life. fantastical cockroaches, making high-pitched Umberto Zampini’s Seven Crowns in noises and moving in unison as they infiltrated Seven Days interjects humour into the idea of the environment. change in status. To the educational music of Another sculpturally embodied ABCmouse’s ‘A Week is Seven Days’, Zampini performance was enacted by Précy Numbi. tried on a different ‘crown’ for each day. Wearing a heavy suit of discarded car parts Filmed with a sepia filter, the artist’s deadpan and scrap metal, Numbi was transfigured expression is framed by a variety of male and into a cyborgic creature, Kimbalambala, as female hats. He investigated how a persona he roams Kinshasa – from landfill to busy can be changed by the simple addition of an neighbourhoods, eventually ending up in accessory. front of a bonfire, repeatedly warning, in Tijana Todorovic transmuted the French, “Danger!” As he arduously moves and reflection of a mantelpiece by painting upon interacts with his environment, his distorted a mirror. On this reflective surface, we were voice was heard talking to himself and given a glimpse of Todorovic’s home – with a engaging with others. small bust of Karl Marx and a Picasso postcard, Umme Farwa mutated into her titular amongst other personal objects. In das kapital- Bobble head. With deliberate velocity, she lockdown street panorama she changed this 5. Former Minister President of Bavaria, and current firmly enveloped her head with rope until quotidian image with the imposition of paint, German Federal Minister of the Interior. 282 Irene Wassner (b. 1991, Mexico)

We became an insect (2020) 6:33 minutes (with Sofía Gabriel, Giannella Ysasi, Yasmine Hadni, and Sahand Heshmati) Chicago, IL, USA

284 286 Précy Numbi (b. 1992, Kisnagani, Democratic Republic of the Congo)

Kimbalambala (2017) 8:07 minutes Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

288 290 292 Umme Farwa Hassan Rizvi (b. 1990, Lahore, Pakistan)

Bobble head (2014) 7:11 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

294 André Fernandez (b. 1968, Martigues, France)

Turbanizer (2020) 7:21 minutes Montreuil, France

296 298 Angeline Malik (b. 1973, Karachi, Pakistan)

What Mask Do You Wear? (2020) 4:03 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

300 Umberto Zampini (b. 1958, Occhiobello, Italy)

Seven Crowns in Seven Days (2020) 2:23 minutes Venice, Italy

302 304 Tijana Todorovic (b. 1984, Titograd, Montenegro) das kapital—lockdown street panorama (2020) 3:17 minutes (with music from Ivan Tomasevic) Podgorica, Montenegro

306 308 Jakob Liebig (b. 1993, Munich, Germany)

Nobis Host (2020) 3:05 minutes Munich, Germany

310 312 Catharsis is the process of releasing, and periodically touch to transmute the electronic The vigorous physicality of the artist’s CATHARSIS thereby providing relief from, strong or music. The vision of this joyful event movements formed the work, which delineated repressed emotions. The cathartic process of represents a cathartic moment of sociality an abstracted panorama of pandemic. creative expression can lead to renewal and that was inaccessible to us during the time of Eric Peter explored the potential release restoration, and often implies a physicality. The lockdown. of emotion through poetry in documentation body responds by releasing endorphins, which Music, however, maintains the power of an excerpt from a “choreopoem”, using have a palpable physiological effect. It is an of purgation even in quarantine. Sameer movement and words to express himself. Peter act of transcendence that liberates; a clarity Aiyar-Majeed, isolated in his attic, elegantly entered the stage and rocked on a swing, that takes us beyond the mundane. transmitted the lyrical melody of The Lark reading from the “choreopoems”, I I C / The Heide Hatry exploded with energy in The Ascending through his violin. This piece was Contract / Ellipsis / Delbaram / Booos / U OK?. Time to Defend. Wearing an industrial-grade composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1914, The artist shared this personal text, exposing mask and a flowing white dress, Hatry kicked inspired by the eponymous paean by the poet an inner being to the audience in an act of out at the camera in aggressive release. Text George Meredith. Such an emotive musical act liberation. appears at the bottom of the frame, beginning evoked a certain spiritual cleansing in a dark, with the statement: ‘The time to defend enclosed space. (AG/AFM) ourselves is over, the enemy is within.’ The Purification was embodied by Noreen potency of the work derives from the uncertain Ali’s untitled performance. Ali hypnotically identity of this ‘enemy’. stared into the flame of a candle, whilst the This dynamic release is paralleled sound of Pakistani television reports on by Beatrice Polini in her video work, Sonho COVID-19 can be heard in the background. (‘Dream’). In a continuous choreography, the At the end of the video, she extinguishes the work began with Polini dancing in a deserted candle, in an emphatic release of breath. São Paulo airport. Seemingly channelling A cleansing rite of regeneration was unseen waves of energy, the footage shifts her performed by Amy Elizabeth Kingsmill as part fluid movements to a beach in Brazil, and then of the inaugural Karachi Biennale in 2017. As manifests in corporeal extension in her garage documented by the BBC, she intravenously in Italy. The constant flow of the contemporary bleeds herself over white roses, which dancer’s body within different spatial contexts absorbed the claret of her blood, and were portrayed the interconnection of her hybrid thus transformed. Indeed, Kingsmill’s work, cultural experience. Fairytale, was almost reminiscent of the InstaMoment No.1 is documentation medieval process of leeching. of a musical performance by the Danish In Birgitta Hosea’s live performance, collective Luftkys, curated by Mikkel Elming. Infection Drawing II (Trojan), we were A duo appears behind mixing equipment, in privileged to view the release valve of making. a lively open-air, informal concert. Bananas Hosea uses two types of stamp – a red ink are placed on the table, connected to the ‘INFECTED’; and a black ink ‘NOT INFECTED’ – sound machinery, which the performers and charcoal to compose an abstract drawing. 314 Heide Hatry (b. 1965, Sindelfingen, Germany)

The Time to Defend (2020) 0:52 minutes Pennsylvania, USA

316 The Time to Defend

The time to defend ourselves is over; The enemy is within, inside the walls, beneath the masks we wore to appear more like it. We’ve breathed its air forever, absorbed it with our food and nursed it at our breast, spread it with our words. Now’s the time to tear down the castle, foreswear the friend who counsels peace.

© Heide Hatry 2020

318 Beatrice Polini (b. 1997, Ancona, Italy)

Sonho (2020) 3:25 minutes São Paulo, Brazil San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy

320 322 Luftkys (Julie Bjørnskov, Cecilie Penney, Niels Bak Henriksen and Søren Vøgg Lyster) (founded 2018, Aarhus, Denmark)

InstaMoment No.1 (2018) 4:06 minutes (curated by Mikkel Elming) Aarhus, Denmark

324 326 Sameer Aiyar- Majeed (b. 2001, London, England)

The Lark Ascending (to the Attic) (2020) 4:42 minutes London, England

328 Noreen Ali (b. 1994, Karachi, Pakistan)

Untitled (2020) 7:04 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

330 Amy Elizabeth Kingsmill (b. 1991, Harlow, England)

Fairytale (2017) 1:47 minutes Karachi, Pakistan

332 334 Birgitta Hosea (b. 1965, Edinburgh, Scotland)

Infection Drawing II (Trojan) (2020) 6:43 minutes London, England

336 338 Eric Peter (b. 1989, Dordrecht, Netherlands)

I I C/The Contract/Ellipsis /Delbaram/Booos/U OK? (2019) From ‘Economy as Intimacy’ 2017-ongoing 3:40 minutes Berlin, Germany

340 Your father asks everyone Desire consumes thinking Forces words out Hurry, hurry For which bus I should take To a liaison Hmmm... And through the large window I cloth as man Possibly futile Do you know? I signal love without him knowing Dressing up interior Wha…what what do I… Standards of L’amour fou forra There was a great Illicit wants and words Fool afag Worderly wrongs Unforeseen twist of life A finger noffing Score a feeling When endless signifieds Meantime, the exterior No thing no day Counteracting a mmm… Gave world to a bottom Smiles with utter *yesses* A face fond of friends And supple mannerisms Sweat I in*hale* With the beat of a techno song Hard to hide Sweeping the face Oh, your name My spirit and skin and lust Widda frown of ___…_ Slip into an image of comfort The summoning of twoism Lucky fonder I pronounce loudly And a timeless nothing of liquidity One can best forget in Between a bowel’s house A hideaway of hopeful A tongue We smoke up on the beach And heartfelt *booos* Attends The beard buries Watching the black waves Trembling A chin’s cheeky With an eruption of foam A *ding ding* incoming text Trees blossoms-full Ges…yes yesss Crash against its rocks Surfaces onna blank screen Ho…ho…hope And fills anxiousness with Jackdaws noisily The salt of sea Emojis and letters of lull Flocking a dome showering Eats away coastline During juices An hour-long In a hunger of millimetres With inaudible *beeep* We flirtatiously drink Drip drip the watteh We do not witness Fact will kick Hāā The face until Then there î ii ll… Echo ebbs into silence It grows lilac blue Lusive manifestational allure Creamy Longing for phrases Vis-á-vis thorough tasks I break—genoeg To fill its brief Sudden spasms of a finger Of timing and terror Stand up arm shoulder Moments of death and birth Hover the screen’s surface Caress care kiss comb And do nothing but G…morning I ask for nosy interrogations Remind body of its *tchâ* and *uhh* Wake up, whe… Cringe sperm norm do Of _ life inna decorated Table Mere más more minnn… Catalogue home without The carry-on battery Now steamy looks Uhm... Have you… A hospitality of sorts Crashes to an alabaster Sssst.... Shhhh, shhh! Lobby—and *bam* Almond glimpses Security fades easily My god, it’s broken forev First communic… Wait wait When smth of more value Sm…a Bahman quickly ‘k Hoorde iema… Enters a terrain wherein A t t ta p t o ô Beyond a bed’s window

342 The man who comes back through the Door intercut, including the artist himself in a itself, creating a grid and irregular ostinato. A HALLUCINA- in the Wall will never be quite the same as the hangman’s noose. A line from Malik’s stream of beehive pattern subsequently forms, which man who went out. He will be wiser but less consciousness encapsulates his liminal state: then incrementally usurps the hearts. sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler TION ‘It slowly started to feel like I was entering a Hura Mirshekari and Mehdi in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of dream. Was I waking up, or sleeping again?’ Yarmohammadi’s work, passper, propagates words to things, of systematic reasoning to the In Shehzar Abro’s Keep Going / Good an illusionistic intimacy. Whilst a poetic unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever Times, this trance-like state morphs into an monologue is recited in Persian, the surreal vainly, to comprehend.6 animation. The video is interspersed with video began with an image of Mirshekari on appropriated imagery from futuristic cartoons the screen of a smartphone. It transpires that This is an excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s The and abstracted, wave-like patterns, as well this is hung around her neck, as the artist Doors of Perception, which elaborates the as a recurring digital illustration of a donkey sat with her head covered by a grey chador author’s psychedelic experiences under revolving within a grid. The discordant, (shawl). Her face is barely visible; the only way the influence of mescaline in 1953. The constantly shifting visuals were held together we can glimpse her is through the screen of hallucinogenic experience of passing through, by the ambient sound of Lucas Ferreira’s the phone. ‘the Door in the Wall’, seems to embody the music, forming a glitchy euphoria. In Forest on Location, Broerson & Lukács curious times we find ourselves in today. Another collaboration between presented us with an altered vision of the last Reality has been altered on a global level. artist and musician appeared in GleamKSA. primeval forest in Europe, Bialowieza Forest Paradigms have shifted, and almost in a Muhanned E. Nasser, a musician/DJ based (Belarus/Poland). The visuals deconstruct the collective fever dream, things that we took in Jeddah worked with desertfish to create imagery of the forest onto multiple, digitised for granted are denied. This is expressed in a psychotropic visual accompaniment to planes, into which the animated figure of an Orwellian catch-phrase; “the new normal”. the sounds. The hypnotic techno beat is Shahram Yazdani enters and then begins to What is certain is that, ‘the man who comes complemented by the animated mutation of sing ‘Nature Boy’ in Persian. Soon afterwards, back through… will never be quite the same as microbial psychedelia, which is constantly Yazdani went live from Berlin, singing his the man who went out.’ disrupted and modulated. own version of ‘Nature Boy’ in both English The sensorial experience of eating a The sound of an electronic keyboard and Persian, adding a further dimension to mango was altered and heightened in Nayan interacted with Faisal Anwar’s body in his the original work. A tension thus materialised Kulkarni’s a little mango sketch. The artist live performance, The Artist is Live. Turquoise between the ‘real’ Yazdani, and the ‘unreal’ appears with a whole green mango in his lines demarcate his body, oscillating with the one, whilst simultaneously allowing the mouth in this darkly psychedelic video. The frequency of the sound. In an ode to Marina audience to engage more deeply with the soundtrack is an amalgamation of amplified Abramović’s iconic performance, The Artist is opera singer’s ethereal vocals. mango slurping, with industrial electronica, Present, Anwar: “invited audiences to observe juxtaposed by text that intermittently repeats: him from the comfort of their own homes and (AG/AFM) ‘Lovely’; ‘Juicy’; ‘Mango’. discover if a connection is made.” Zayed Malik’s City of Lights also had an Abdullah M. I. Syed’s animation replaced overtly hallucinogenic quality. In a substance- the sound of the keyboard with multiplying fuelled internal monologue that is both visual beating hearts. Rhythm II began with a 6. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: and sonic, an overload of imagery is rapidly solitary, pulsating heart, which replicates Chatto & Windus, 1954), p. 49. 344 Nayan Kulkarni (b. 1969, Norwich, England) a little mango sketch (2020) 6:58 minutes London, England

346 348 350 Zayed Malik (b. 1991, Lahore, Pakistan)

City of Lights (2020) 1:11 minutes Lahore, Pakistan

352 354 Shehzar Abro (b. 1997, Karachi, Pakistan)

Keep Going/Good Times (2020) 1:45 minutes (with music from Lucas Brian Ferreira) Vancouver, Canada

356 358 Muhanned E. Nassar (Vinylmode) (b. 1987, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

GleamKSA (2020) 7:40 minutes (with Desertfish) Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

360 362 Faisal Anwar (b. 1970, Murree, Pakistan)

The Artist is Live (2020) 6:37 minutes Toronto, Canada

364 366 Abdullah M. I. Syed (b. 1974, Karachi, Pakistan)

Rhythm II (2009) 5:15 minutes Sydney, Australia

368 370 Hura Mirshekari (b. 1985, Zarand, Iran)

Mehdi Yarmohammadi (b. 1979, Zabol, Iran) passper (2019) 1:39 minutes Paris, France

372 Sweep Me

Withered leaf, fell on the street. Street sweeper, sweeps his child. It’s dark. He/she sweep me, You sweep me, Them sweeps me Time flies, when you blink! I blink! Them blinks! He/she sweep me, You sweep me, Them sweeps me Wet eyelashes of beautiful girl! Snowflakes! Turn dark Lovely regard! Behind an angry cloud! It’s dark. ”پس می زند “ برگی پالسیده ، افتاده از درخت ، بر کف آسفالت ، جارو می زند رفتگر شبانه، جارو می زند فرزندش را ، سیاه است ، پس می زنی مرا ، پس می زند مرا ، پس می زنند مرا من هستم ،می خواهم باشم ، خوب نگاه کن ، نادیده نگیر مرا زمان می گذرد ، وقتی پلک می زنی ، پلک می زند ، پلک می زنند نگاه می کنم ، چشامنت بسته است ، سیاه است . پس می زنی مرا ، پس می زند مرا ، پس می زنند مرا من هستم ، می خواهم باشم ، خوب نگاه کن ، نادیده نگیر مرا . مژه های خیس دخرتک زیبا ، سیاه می شود از ریز دانه های برف طعم دیده شدن دریغ می شود، در پس ابری خشمگین، به امید بارش برف بهار سیاه است ، پس می زنی مرا ، پس می زند مرا ، پس می زنند مرا

374 Broersen & Lukács (Margit Lukács, b. 1973, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Persijn Broersen, b. 1974, Delft, Netherlands)

Forest on Location (2018) 5:17 minutes (with music from Shahram Yazdani) Amsterdam, Netherlands

376 378 380 Sharam Yazdani (b. 1986, Kermanshah, Iran)

Persian Version of ‘Nature Boy’ (2020) 5:55 minutes Berlin, Germany

382 Nature Boy

...در عشق گذر کن .. ِقهرمان قصه ی ما یه پرس بود The hero of our story was a boy... Pass in love....

******** ******* ...یه غریبو تک و تنها، بی پروا، توو ِحجم ِسبز جنگل ....با عشق سفر کن A lonely one, reckless, among the green volume of the forest.... Travel with love...

******** ********** .....تا اینکه یک روز ...جز عشق مگو چون ُ ...Until one Day Say nothing but Love... ******** ******* :پیرترین ِدرخت جنگل، ِدر ِگوش او چنین گفت ....این دنیا ، تنها با عشق زیباست The oldest tree in the forest whispered in his ear: This world is beautiful only with LOVE...

****** Lyrics and Translation by SHAHRAM YAZDANI !ای زیبا !!!، ای فرزند جنگل The most recent variation of the : O Beautiful!! , O child of the forest! (“Nature boy” hit by N.K.COLE.)

****** Copyrights belong to: Shahram Yazdani (Music, lyrics and vocal) Persijn Broersen,Margit Lukacs (Video production and Conceptions) Berend Dubbe,G.T.Thomas (Music arrangements and orchestrations)

384 THE TROJAN DONKEY

386 Here are we in 2020. A couple of years ago, systems i.e. the key words of hard science’s out there today, and among them is Mister E C STA S Y esoteric foreseers stated that it would be the contemporary paradigm. The mythological Make America Great Again aka Donald Trump, end of the world, given the number it shows. tale it is extracted from heralds a character of course. Reasons to go definitely mad are MATTERS Well, and for the time being, we are all still called Koba personifying what I would call growing fast. Where will it lead us from here, if there as a global and babelian world tied by here creative disobedience. Responding nothing happens in the meantime to change capitalism. Isn’t it? Nevertheless, in the face to his twin brother Kwan’s mayday, who left the curse and the curve? of that prediction and labeled Covid-19 by their realm to stand aside and design his own scientists, there is a big but. The touring virus world (but things went weird), Koba overrides Ego has severely driven down the market economy, their father Hilolombi’s instructions not to thanks to the drastic measures taken by help the pretender, leading a dedicated task Jumping to another region of Africa, there governments in order to break contamination, force made of 101 braves against entropy. are the Mwaba-Gurma people, in northern both North and South, and the subsequent Will you out there dare, in 2020, a fresh sip Togo, who say that a human being is nature Lionel Manga tumble of consumption. All supplies chains of thermodynamics with so-called primitive walking on two legs. A French geographer, came to a stop, as China where the virus cultures? Elisée Reclus, known to be an anarchist, stated emerged was hit and under quarantine. The While science is known to be the realm exactly the same understanding at the end of money-spinning merry-go-round has been of Logos, I assume that only a few might be the 19th century. According to the M.B, those taken by surprise and we are heading towards aware of Mètis, the Trojan Horse being its folks who wonder why there is something the worst economic depression since the end genuine exemplification, as the essence of instead of nothing are still kids. Under of WW2. As a result, amidst many neguentropic ruse at the expense of naivety. Not only, as such a light, are not all Greek philosophers others of that enormous crash, people in we know the heavy price is nature paying disqualified in a snap? And even their Katmandu can enjoy Everest again from a nowadays to the Faustian mind embedded Cartesian posterity of the arrogant Western distance. For many years, thick smog due to in Greek thinking. The middle-excluded logic world? What the French anthropologist Alfred atmospheric pollution was hiding the sacred has driven the world at full speed into the de Surgy describes at first sight as basic mountain. Is this not marvelous? Larger than 6th Extinction—and the good news is that religious practices1, has clearly to do with Black lives, and because at the end of the day giraffes are on the brink of extinction. Look algorithms, seen from an objective point of it is the ultimate aim of being alive, ecstasy at what the criminal money makers are doing view i.e. protocols to deal with the place matters. Who the hell on Earth will stand for to the pangolin, a so gentle animal, harming where nothing lacks in order to fuel daily the Mother of Causes? by cupidity ecosystems. Look at what cost life, based on cognitive patterns long settled There is a sophisticated Bantu saying in Democratic Republic of Congo, where and isomorphisms provided by a complex that reads in French « Le monde est une children are digging coltan mines in horrific Weltanschaung. Since divination, as a smart chute de chimpanzé, il se perturbe et il se conditions, Apple & Co provide their hedonist technology, aims firstly at reducing uncertainty, restaure ». While it depicts literally how a customers with smartphones and so on. What the practitioners are information processors chimp makes its way through the forest about corporate and social responsibility in without a doubt and their job is about data tangle and always far from equilibrium, flying this field? The cannibal market economy flags mining avant la lettre. from a branch or a liana to another nearby, Mètis as a vast system of codified trickery Expressing concerns over modernity’s absolutely fluid, it comprehensively speaks of displayed throughout our planet. There are current issues, the Mwaba Gurma point complexity, non-linearity and self-organized more than many ”look at” moments piling up straight to a culprit: ego exaltation. There is 388 too much of that going on nowadays around to the place where nothing lacks. You say by Annie Lebrun, French sculptor and Securitization was launched with swaps the clock, they say, and at some point would fatality? Safe of that mood is their mindset. writer, in her last book published3. Far more providing a shield against losses that may I add, it sounds really like a kind of addiction. Thus, religion practices are not at all about than passion or dreams, she argues, this occur through currency exchange. Assets What but a vacuum does it fill in our world dealing with invisible and mysterious entities. unprecedented war is conducted against under management are due to reach the by Faustian minds mainly driven? The global Far from whatever vitalism stands for, it has vibrant beauty and all that seems so far not astronomical amount of 88 trillion dollars in infotainment system is mostly dedicated to more to do with a quest leading each and all to be a source of value. A particular district of 2020. Seriously, does this crazy figure still adulation. From the radiant Lupita Nyongo within the community, to go and knock at the contemporary art has proved to be fueling it, mean anything sizeable when it comes to the to the funny Usain Bolt and going through door of origin as sovereign being(s) and take given its close links with speculative finance impecunious/precarious existence of millions the placid Tiger Woods, show business, control of their life course. Just to discover at and serving as neutralizer of what may and millions of people on Earth? While public professional sport and the movie industry are the end of the day that they are not limited by harm that established order. The capitalist health systems everywhere, except Cuba, have contributing to that civilization slide, and the and not subject to what they think at first was merry-go-round seeks in fact to enroll every been year after year callously demolished by art world actually challenges them seriously as them, since there is finally much more than corner and spot that constitutes the puzzle lean management rules, some 80 000 billion a strong hole of egomania. From MoMa walls that to fetch. We are light years away from the of reality. How long shall we therefore turn dollars extorted to nations are carefully hidden to Venice Biennale pavilions, the “Johnnie modern exaltation of our ego orchestrated our eyes and look the other way, whilst the off-shore, thanks to clever white collars whose Be Good tonight” syndrome, or having one’s by the market economy propaganda and violence of money is destroying what she accountancy expertise takes advantage of name cast in the light, is more than ever coined as the concept of homo economicus, deems our sensitive night? Since it actually shortfalls in fiscal procedures, at the expense blooming and continuously provides good stuff especially the male winner overshadowing his aims at setting once and for all an irrefutable of common good and general interest. for mainstream storytellers and columnists. entourage. Is it truly the ad-hoc psychological domination steered by a cosmopolitan club of Thanks to convergence, the digital scene has profile to tackle the coming challenges of a Richistan-based happy few, the peril is quite Reset or shifting? quickly joined that ego soft parade with icons climate change? Isn’t it time to dump the immense and poses a significant threat to our buzzing through Instagram and Facebook, “strong man” ideology into the trash can, frantic quest of what is priceless. What the hell do we come to life for? If there such as the Kardashian sisters whose due to obsolescence? Who will stand for Looking at it forty-seven years later, is only one human being who has never met glamorous lure can claim proudly several tenderness against the ongoing brutality that Pink Floyd’s planetary hit Money sounds with this highly disturbing and ontological millions of followers. Welcome to the glittering defaces the planet all over? The philosopher so visionary, in face of what the world has question, his name ought to be entered age of triumphant futility and egotism? Peter Sloterdijk dubs its agents “degradados” experienced since its release in 1973. “Money straight away in the Guinness Book of World Selfie and selfish are words that match/go and it already started five centuries ago with is a gas, grab that cash with both hands Records. The Mwaba-Gurma wisdom, again, together so well, given that escaping by all Spanish conquistadors driven by dementia and make a stash, new car, caviar, four star offers a genuine and simple response to that: means anonymity turns into a modern Graal, and disinhibition2. The well known German daydream, think I’ll buy me a football team” expressing oneself is the ultimate aim of the ultimate achievement of our times as filmmaker Werner Herzog depicts that with Emitted by the Federal Reserve as the first existence and the more such an expression individuals. Again, where will it lead us from what the character Klaus Kinski embodies in oil crisis was breaking in the fall of that very is unlikely, the more it makes sense and is here? Aguirre ou la colère des dieux. year and meant to help importing countries creative. Isn’t this matching with what the A free man, also stipulates the Mwaba- pay their bill all of a sudden quadrupling, the theory of information says? At the top of their Gurma thinking, should not surrender to A silent war then so-called “petro dollars” by scholars speculative system sits Yedu, personifying circumstances and his duty consists of did set the pace for a financial sphere. the Sun. Among the souls sent to life thanks escaping the rigid chain of events. We are not While most Terrestrials stand quietly aside And inflation blooms since the quantity of to his decision, following a complex scheme meant to suffer and in this light, sacrifice is and look, the picture of the world is worsening money circulating exceeded in value the similar to an algorithm here too, some of them the modus operandi paving a direct access day by day, because of a silent war decried one of products and services marketed. are meant for special works: this resonates 390 with the taskforce composed of the 101 brave humanity and shall judge us severely. souls led by Koba to tackle entropy and help Reset or shifting? At their first physical his twin brother Kwan in distress. May I deem meeting since the crisis broke in January this them here the beautiful ones? Who and where year, as I write, European leaders in Brussels are those of our dire times? We are seeing have finally come to a bailout agreement of them standing despite scanty wages at the 750 billion euros, concluding what is said to forefront of the sanitary crisis: the caretakers. have been rough negotiations. Enthusiastic Without their extraordinary commitment, the comments are now spreading through the Faustian society would have collapsed in a media over whether subventions or loans, few days and still it was overwhelmed by the financial markets expressing satisfaction will range of daily tolls, until the dead curve starts show up as green figures. While the tragedy to reverse. some enlightened Cassandras have predicted Disrupting the routine on a scale never in Africa is still awaited and might not actually seen before, Covid-19 has stripped the happen, thanks to a good mix of factors, merry-go-round and freezing demand at the people all around are dazed by what France, level of basics needs during the lockdown Italy and Spain have experienced. Arrogant has revealed not only a bubble but also how Whites just dying like flies? Such a weird far uselessness has gone nowadays in the picture was so far absolutely unimaginable comfort zone. Is not its lethal cruise sending in the deemed no hope zone; the historical us a clear message about our way of life? Shall resentment of some folks there might consider we not think twice and make our minds right it a Nemesis the Faustians properly deserve as for a radical shift in consumption if we do payment for what they have done to the world really care for our planet? On July 25th 2019, at large for five centuries. 230 000 planes were flying around the globe, a record in the history of aerial transportation, but it was also the hottest day ever in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany or Luxembourg. Who is blind enough not to see a causality link between these two events? Scientists have been warning for long about disastrous consequences of the average temperature going up just a little, but it seems polluters are Endnotes as deaf as stones. Green house gas emissions 1 La divination par les huit cordelettes des are not lessening and some governments even Mwaba-Gurma (Nord Togo) T.1, 1985, L’Harmattan intend to revamp coal mining. You know what? Future generations might consider present 2 Le palais de Cristal, 2009, Hachette Littératures inertia/procrastination a crime against 3 Annie Lebrun, Ce qui n’a pas de prix, Stock, 2018 392 The Trojan horse of myth was an aesthetically Performance happens at a moment increased politicization. As time passes, this THE TROJAN pleasing object full of danger. Today, during the in time, and the Trojan Donkey project is a disparate and motley patchwork of strong Covid-19 shutdown, each home has become snapshot of a particular period in April, 2020, videos sheltering under this project’s umbrella DONKEY its own Trojan horse: a place of containment in when much of the world was shut down for comes to seem an ever more cohesive a time of crisis, filled with power and potential what then seemed like already an eternity, expression. danger waiting to be released. This is the but has proven to be only the beginning of a My own point of departure for The Trojan donkey: not perhaps as graceful as much longer chapter. It was a rare moment Trojan Donkey was the realization that social its namesake, more practically minded, and when much of the world’s population — distancing is nothing new for female artists. capable of making a loud and penetrating albeit involuntarily, and often protestingly — Being confined to the home, in the domestic noise. was in sync. Although the virus was already sphere, and seeking to break out of it, is part How can you perform when you cannot forcing geopolitical divisions to become of a tradition that’s been perpetuated for come together? How can you present art ever more pronounced (as countries locked centuries, across cultures. It seems there is a Anne Midgette without the immediacy of physical experience? down and created virtual border walls around great deal of danger involved in letting women All of The Trojan Donkey is a performance. It themselves, and physical travel became nearly express themselves. In the original story of the plays out at the Venn diagram intersection impossible), this project brought together Trojan horse, only one person fully sees the between performance art, video art, and social voices from around the globe, all addressing a danger, a woman — Cassandra — but no one is media: voices talking at and to and with each similar situation in distinctive ways, but with a able to understand her. other, across distances, image and sound rare unity of understanding and context that’s It isn’t just women, though. In the overlapping and weaving together into a new unprecedented in the world of contemporary vainglorious and doomed Troy represented hybrid. In it, we all perform the shutdown art. Each video in the project became a kind by the Western artistic canon, there is a for each other — sometimes literally, like of self-assertion at the most basic level: I am great deal of danger in empowering anyone Richard Humann’s “Caged,” which depicts here, and here is my take on what we are all, on the margins — Black artists, artists of the march of seconds alongside images of together, experiencing. color, Latinx artists, Asian artists, African hours of time spent at home in upstate New Within a few months, those cogs had artists, all those outside what is perceived York; or Eeman Raja’s “I seek thee,” a self- begun to slip out of alignment, as some to be the mainstream. The Trojan Donkey proclaimed “quarantine happening” in which countries recovered from the virus while project tangibly demonstrates the power of dots of reflected light wander across the others were increasingly ravaged by it. And these forces, and the utter irrelevance of facades of buildings in a quiet city, tracing the the freshness of reaction that surfaces time boundaries and canons to what they have to physical limits of a view that is circumscribed and again throughout these videos — like say. The donkey, stubborn and braying loudly, by circumstance. But even work that was the exuberant spirit of Irene Wassner’s “We speaks for an army trying to break down the conceived independently of the shutdown, like became an insect” — has gradually been walls. Break out? Break in? Which side of the Honi Ryan’s 2014 “Transferal (Fluid Bodies)” replaced, in the intervening months, by world- wall are we on? Is it we who are confined, or Faryal Yazdanie’s “Real and its double” weariness, whether among those buckling or those who are hiding in the Troy of their from 2018, have a different resonance now in for the long haul and examining how to ivory towers, fingers in their ears, asserting that repetitive action in a confined space continue making art in a changed world, that the Western canon is the pinnacle of has become no longer solely an artistic or those who are simply punch-drunk from the world’s achievement? Again, the donkey commentary, but literally a way of life. the unalleviated press of events and their brays. The Western canon may claim the 394 story of the Trojan horse as its own, but this spread art to our brave new world. I met the Scheherazade of Baghdad quadruped moved past the boundaries of the In a teahouse in London so-called West long ago. One of the earliest Zehra Nigah She had changed beyond recognition extant artistic representations of the myth “Scheherezade in London” Relying upon the commonality of religion is a carving from the second or third century by Zehra Nigah; Ghazipur Wala Obaid, Holding on to tradition A.D. from a Buddhist temple near Mardan, in translator I asked her with affection: present-day Pakistan. The donkey got here http://ghazipurwalamakki.blogspot. ‘Do you remember your art - long before we did. com/2012/10/zehra-nigah.html The art of telling stories So it is that this sturdy project exhibits Scheherazade in London The art that could bring life to lifeless hearts robust good health, and hope — the hope The art that gave new life to someone every inherent in a time of such stagnation giving evening?’ birth to something so eloquent. And the individual videos that comprise it will continue Scheherazade was quiet for a while to shift, like the tiles in a kaleidoscope, casting And then she said: new kinds of illumination on the changing ‘Like the rest of the world, you too don’t know; world around them. Meetings have been suspended in the city of In my research leading up to the Baghdad show, I came across a poem by Zehra Nigah, Like people, words too are dead one of Pakistan’s most famous poets, And my art that perfectly expresses at least a part of Is dependent upon meetings, upon words what this ambitious project is all about. In Following my ancestors “Scheherezade in London,” the iconic story- Walking the path of hijrat, I came here teller sits in a tea room, having had to adjust The city of London is a benevolent city her entire mode of communication. “Meetings Morning and evening, newly-descended caliphs have been suspended in the city of Baghdad,” come here she explains, adding, “words too are dead / Travelling with the change in the seasons and my art / is dependent upon meetings, Like birds upon words.” As a result, she has found new They call me ways to tell stories, effectively at a distance. They listen to new stories from every fibre of my Has Nigah’s international Scheherazade being transformed herself and found a new way to And then they go back.’ narrate, or is she speaking only to the few who are capable of understanding her? Perhaps both. Like her, all the artists represented here are, or were, faced with figuring out new ways that they can continue to speak. Astride the Trojan Donkey’s broad back, they rode out to 396 Watching artist Muhammed Osama Saeed’s that is the danger: aerosolized particles of through various perspectives: as a time of ON BREATH performance in Sequence No 1, one of the 80 Covid float in the air when we breathe, or confinement or freedom, frustration or bliss. videos in The Trojan Donkey online exhibition, droplets expelled at force when we sneeze It can be perceived as never-ending or finite, I am fascinated by his “ritualised relaxation”, or cough, can bring illness and death to our of being stuck in one place or given room to in which he enters his private space, removes very doorstep. We are told that wearing masks transform and grow. The videos in The Trojan his mask, and exhales deeply. He continues is what will save us, and save others. This Donkey reflect all of these perspectives and to lounge in a chair, yawning freely, then presents a real cognitive dissonance: we have more: they are short, but because of the focus lights a cigarette and enjoys this little treat in been told, always, that breath is life. How to and intensity, stretch out to feel longer. complete solitude/freedom. Noor Ahmed sits cope with the idea that breath is death? I feel In normal circumstances, performance on the floor of her bathroom with a crystal on that much of the artistic output in The Trojan art is interactive, but for now, the audience her knee in Breathe with Me, finding her own Donkey grapples with this paradox, either becomes passive, limited to watching through sort of peace in her aloneness. directly or indirectly. The artists, each in their a screen, which takes away from the viscerality Bina Shah Lujane Vaqar Pagganwala stops her own way, express the very fact that they are of the immediate moment. Also, the videos breath by gluing her mouth shut; Faran Qureshi alive; that they are breathing. That art is a can be viewed again and again, which does tries to unblock his breath with a toilet plunger. place in which you can breathe safely. not always happen with performance art; what Masks feature in several of the videos: Life itself begins with a first breath. happens in the duration of a live performance Saeed’s is a golden theater mask, Connie Many religious traditions focus on the breath cannot be recaptured, even if the artist Voisine reads a poem muffled by a cloth of the Divine, pushed into the inanimate body performs the same routine in exactly the same face covering, while Angeline Malik explores to give it life. Hinduism, through yoga, makes a way. The same is true of breath, according to masking with several paper disguises she has study of breath, turning it into both an art and scientists at UCLA who performed a study on constructed and painted in various colors and a science called Pranayama. Many people are what the brain does when breathing takes designs, asking us “What Mask Do You Wear?” coping with the strain of lockdown by turning place. In this time of Covid-19, the pandemic to meditation and breathwork. Quelling anxiety that has brought the world to a standstill without the use of pharmaceuticals involves “We were surprised to learn that how and upended all our ideas about our lives, slowing down the breath, or breathing into our brain cells work together to generate breath emerges as one of the most vital, the chakras of the body to restore energy and breathing rhythm is different every time overarching themes. The effect of the disease remove blockages. we take a breath,” explained senior author on the lungs has been well-documented, In a simple breathing exercise called Jack Feldman, a professor of neurobiology reading like a script from a horror story. We square breathing or box breathing, people at the David Geffen School of Medicine are shocked by images of anonymous bodies are taught to breathe in, pause, breathe out, at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Brain lying prone in hospital beds, hooked up to pause, visualizing a square or box as they Research Institute. “Each breath is a like a ventilators. We are confronted with the reality do, in order to feel calm. There is resonance new song with the same beat.”1 of shortages of oxygen cylinders, prices jacked with what some people are calling this time up by unscrupulous profiteers. Breath is the - The Great Pause. Our lives have been put It would be a very pretentious thing to assert commodity that the disease robs from us; on pause so that we might slow down and that art is as necessary to life as breath, patients die, gasping for air. breathe. Our schedules and routines are on although most artists live and die by this Scientists tell us that it is our breath hold. What happens in this time can be seen assertion. But during lockdown, millions of 398 people have relied on art to help them get through the restrictions, take their minds off their difficulties. People have been imbibing literature, music, poetry, movies, visual art, but also watching dance, theater, and other performances online to soothe their souls. Prufrock, in the T. S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”, measures his life out in coffee spoons, while the yoga masters believe that our lives contain a finite number of breaths and the way to live a long life is to make them slower ones. In the time of the Great Pause, the Covid pandemic, art inspires us to breathe every breath with passion and purpose. If we succeed in doing this even for some of our allotted breaths, we will all have lived full lives, regardless of how long they last.

1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2020/03/200303155705.html 400 Amin Gulgee (b. 1965, Karachi, Pakistan) the Amin Gulgee Gallery and the Goethe- Mix Tape (1), an exhibition of contemporary CURATORS is an artist-curator based in Karachi. He Institut, it was a multidisciplinary exploration performance art from all over Pakistan at received a BA in Art History and Economics of urban subcultures in Pakistan and Germany. Canvas Gallery, Karachi. She has since been from Yale University in 1986. He has exhibited Gulgee was Chief Curator of the inaugural a part of curating numerous shows in Karachi his sculpture and installation all over the Karachi Biennale in 2017, which included the including The Quantum City: Territory | Space | world. His most recent solos were “7” at work of 182 artists from Asia, Australia, Africa, Place, which was the first International Public the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy and Europe, South America and North America. Art Festival at the iconic Karachi Port Trust “7.7” at Mattatoio, Rome, Italy (2018). He has In 2019, he curated 32 international artists (co-curated with Amin Gulgee and Zarmeene been active as a curator in Karachi since for “One Night Stand / Coup d’un soir,” an Shah); Lal Jadoo, an exhibition of performance the 1990s. A working artist, he questions exhibition/happening of performance art art at Karachi House and a part of the second the power hierarchy of curatorship. Through at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, International Public Art Festival which was his cross-disciplinary approach, he explores France. The same year, he co-curated, with streamed live (co-curated by Amin Gulgee); unlikely connections to uncover alternative Sara Pagganwala and Zarmeene Shah, “The and If These Walls Could Talk, a public art narratives. In 2000, he established the Amin Quantum City: Territory | Space| Place” for the event of 34 videos from 21 countries (co- Gulgee Gallery, an artist-led, non-commercial First International Public Art Festival in Karachi. curated by Amin Gulgee). She has worked as space where he also lives and works. He In March of 2020, he and Sara Pagganwala an assistant curator at Canvas Gallery and as regularly collaborates with outside curators co-curated “Lal Jadoo,” a group exhibition part of the adjunct faculty in the Liberal Arts to realize large-scale projects there. The of Pakistani performance art for the Second department at the Indus Valley School of Art gallery’s primary focus is on contemporary International Public Art Festival in Karachi. and Architecture, where she designed and Pakistani art. It has also engaged with In August of 2020, he and Pagganwala co- introduced performance art as a course for the South-South dialogues, presenting shows curated “If These Walls Could Talk,” a public first time in Pakistan. highlighting the connections between African art event of 34 videos from 21 countries in the and Southeast Asian art and contemporary heart of Karachi. Adam Fahy-Majeed (b. 1996, Sydney, Australia) Pakistani practices. Exhibitions at the gallery is a writer and curator currently pursuing his are usually accompanied by catalogues. Sara Vaqar Pagganwala (b. 1986, Karachi, Master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary They include the scholarly volumes Artists’ Pakistan) received her BFA (hons) from Central Art History, at the School of the Art Institute of Voices: Calligraphy and Artists’ Voices: St. Martins, University of the Arts, London and Chicago. Adam graduated from the University Body (Oxford University Press, 2006) and is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. She of Leeds in 2019, receiving a Joint Honours Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade: An Informal has been a part of several group shows locally BA in History of Art and Italian. In a curatorial Cultural History of the 1970s (Oxford University and internationally. Her work explores the capacity, he has been involved in various Press, 2019.) The gallery is also one of the construction and rearrangement of different projects, including the first Karachi Biennale first to provide a platform for performance materials and properties and asks questions in 2017; and Amin Gulgee’s 7 and 7. 7 solo- art in Pakistan. It has hosted two exhibitions about form and control. She also investigates exhibitions in Rome, 2018. His writing has been dedicated specifically to it: “Riwhyti: One notions of the body and identity as a repetitive published in multiple catalogues, as well as Stand” (2013) and “Dreamscape” (2015). constant, especially in her performative work. in the form of feature-length articles for The The most recent show at the gallery was Pagganwala was an assistant curator for the Friday Times. “Outsiders” (2018). A collaboration between inaugural Karachi Biennale 2017 and curated 402 This e-catalogue accompanies the online exhibition The Trojan Donkey curated by Amin Gulgee, Sara Vaqar Pagganwala and Adam Fahy-Majeed on April 25, 2020 from 9:18-11:13 pm (Pakistan Standard Time)

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Design: Muniba Rasheed Essays: Amin Gulgee, Sara Vaqar Pagganwala, Adam Fahy-Majeed, Salima Hashmi, John McCarry, Lionel Manga, Anne Midgette and Bina Shah Curatorial Texts: Amin Gulgee and Adam Fahy-Majeed Technical Advisor: Hormuz Irani

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