Performance: “Kiss of the Spider Woman” 

RSVP (Free Admission) 
Saturday April 9th, 2022, 6:07pm to 7:17pm. 

This will be a collaborative performance work with 13+ participants which will take place over a period of 77 minutes. The approach will be cross-disciplinary as Gulgee will engage actors, dancers, visual artists and musicians to work with him. This will be an experiential event and the audience will navigate through the space as the performances simultaneously occur around them. All the senses will be engaged in this journey of touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Through these senses information is sent to the brain to help us understand the world around us. Installations and projections will be employed emotively. This will be an act of collective dreaming. As Yoko Ono famously said: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is a reality.”

Exhibition hours and admission

Amin Gulgee: The Spider Speaketh in Tongues will be on view starting April 8th, 2022 - July 9th, 2022.

South Asia Institute is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, from 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

General admission is $10, students with ID is $5 and children under 12 are free.

About the Exhibition

This immersive exhibition presents an opportunity to entangle oneself in Amin Gulgee’s aesthetic web. His praxis explores unlikely connections to uncover alternative narratives, resisting conceptual categorization. He attempts to dissolve the divisions not only between the many layers of South Asian spirituality, but those of gender and sexuality. This non dualistic approach manifests itself in the materiality of his metalwork, and is reflected in the philosophy behind his performative and curatorial practices. As the late doyen of Islamic art history, Oleg Grabar wrote:

…works by Amin Gulgee bewilder us by the variety of their expressions, by an apparent freedom in technique and design, by the range of pleasures they offer… It is clear that Gulgee is trying to find the limits of a sculptor’s art… he gives pleasure to the senses and excites the mind.

For over three decades, Amin Gulgee has been spinning threads that interweave sculpture (primarily in copper and bronze), performance and curation. His curatorial practice spans over two decades. In 2017, Amin Gulgee was the Chief Curator of the inaugural Karachi Biennale, Pakistan’s first biennial. Performance is an integral aspect of both his curatorial and personal practice. Gulgee has enacted over 30 performances throughout his trajectory.

His last series of solo-exhibitions, entitled 7, took place in 2018, from Kuala Lumpur (Wei-Ling Contemporary) to Karachi, culminating in concurrent exhibitions at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, and the Mattatoio di Roma. Prior to this series, Gulgee’s work had been shown in 47 solo-exhibitions across the world. He has 10 public works, including: Steps (2003), located in front of the Parliament of Pakistan, Islamabad; as well as Reaching for the Skies (2019) in the Rose Garden of the United Nations, New York.

The South Asia Institute will host The Spider Speaketh in Tongues, an encapsulation of Amin Gulgee’s practice curated by School of the Art Institute Alumnus, Adam Fahy-Majeed.

To make this exhibition accessible to all, there will be no admission charge on Fridays with the promo code #CommunitySAI.

Advance reservations are recommended by visiting www.saichicago.org.

South Asia Institute adheres to the latest health guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Facial covering is optional.

 

For more information on South Asia Institute or the Amin Gulgee: The Spider Speaketh in Tongues exhibition, please visit www.saichicago.org or call 312-929-3911.

Spider Raga VI (Copper), 2012. Courtesy of SAI.