No Man’s Land
No Man’s Land is a monograph about Amin Gulgee — a sculptor, a performance artist and a curator. That should be a comprehensive description, but it’s not. The more one hears and reads about Amin Gulgee, the more the mystery deepens. No Man’s Land suggests that in-between space of uneasy peace in a zone of conflict, a space in which Amin gathers the fragmented, the wounded and the heroic. Sometimes he is Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ and, sometimes, his space becomes Théodore Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa.’ The book has 12 essays by a wide range of curators, novelists, artists, academics, critics from Pakistan and across the globe. Amin asked the contributors to consider the book an invitation to a party. They could write whatever they felt like. A good place to start is in the middle, with the interview by Maryam Ekhtiar, curator at the Department of Islamic Art, Metropo
No Man’s Land By Amin Gulgee
Distributed by Lightstone Publishers ISBN: 978-88-572-5292-6
No Man’s Land is a monograph about Amin Gulgee — a sculptor, a performance artist and a curator. That should be a comprehensive description, but it’s not. The more one hears and reads about Amin Gulgee, the more the mystery deepens.
No Man’s Land suggests that in-between space of uneasy peace in a zone of conflict, a space in which Amin gathers the fragmented, the wounded and the heroic. Sometimes he is Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ and, sometimes, his space becomes Théodore Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa.’
The book has 12 essays by a wide range of curators, novelists, artists, academics, critics from Pakistan and across the globe. Amin asked the contributors to consider the book an invitation to a party. They could write whatever they felt like.
A good place to start is in the middle, with the interview by Maryam Ekhtiar, curator at the Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her neutral prompts offer an unmediated narrative insight into the genesis of Amin Gulgee the artist, in his own words. He takes us on his journey of 35 years.
A beautifully produced coffee table book attempts to unravel the mystery of the artist and his creative output with essays by a wide range of curators, novelists, artists, academics and critics from Pakistan and across the globe
His first creative work was jewellery, which flew out of the confines of delicate craftsmanship into something closer to sculpture. The catwalk of Karachi’s fashion industry opened up the world of performance art that incorporated the bronze and copper elements that led to his signature sculpture works. He relates questions asked by street urchins at Karachi’s Jamshed Road, where he was working with welders. Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Questions he says he is still searching for the answers to.
Amin explains his creative process — a letting go, submitting to the process. “The thread that runs through my work is the thread itself. I hold on to it and it leads me where it wants to go.”
The essay by Dominique Malaquis, a historian, contemporary African art critic and researcher, is particularly poignant, as she sadly passed away in 2021. The following year, Amin honoured her with a ‘Requiem’, performed on the streets of Paris with her widower. He credits her with discovering the artist within himself when they were both at Yale, where she seduced him away from economics and banking to attend art history classes.
He graduated with a double-major in economics and art history. Malaquais reflects on Amin’s ability to bring out the connections between beauty and violence, pain and healing, harnessing inner turmoil with immense strength, producing work “both terrifying and powerfully centring.”
Alexi Worth, A New York-based painter, curator, art critic and writer sees Amin’s performances mirroring his larger-than-life personality. “Even before he ‘discovered’ performance, Amin Gulgee was a performer.” He sees Amin’s performances as “multicultural utopias”, where “the dreams and visions of people across the globe could unite.”
Amin’s first creative work was jewellery, which flew out of the confines of delicate raftsmanship into something closer to sculpture. The catwalk of Karachi’s fashion industry opened up the world of performance art that incorporated the bronze and copper elements that led to his signature sculpture works. He relates questions asked by street urchins at Karachi’s Jamshed Road, where he was working with welders. Who are you? What are you doing?
He finds a parallel between Amin’s late father Ismail Gulgee’s abstract expressionism linked with calligraphy and Amin’s positioning of religious icons within avant-gardism. He makes “being Muslim and being modern seem not just reconcilable but synonymous.”
Only two essays are reprints — the one by Oleg Grabar and another by Dr Kishwar Rizvi, who is the Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University. The other 10 essays are new writings by Alexi Worth, Zarmene Shah, Dominique Malaquais, Atteqa Ali, H.M. Naqvi, Maryam Ekhtiar, Gemma Sharpe, Simone Wille, Robert Sagerman and Salima Hashmi.
The late Oleg Graber, Harvard’s first Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, opens the conversation with an essay he wrote for a 2007 catalogue. He was Amin’s adviser for his dissertation on Islamic Gardens and presents a spiritual interpretation to his work — “A new and original attempt at understanding the universe and man’s role in it.”
The last essay, ‘Fearless’ is by Salima Hashmi, artist, art historian and under whose term as dean of the National College of Arts many of Pakistan’s most innovative artists emerged, taking their place on international art platforms.
In between are essays that buzz with discussions that one would expect to hear at any of Amin’s other-worldly events: about Amin as a storyteller, as an alchemist, as a postnational artist, and an artist who is quintessentially Karachi; about work that is monumental, work that is ephemeral, work that is loud and rebellious or holds the silence of quiet pain, about work that reflects the politics of its time, and work that speaks to the universal soul. Some find connections with other artists, some find Amin Gulgee defies categorisation.
The beautifully produced book is designed by Kiran Ahmed, and edited by John McCarry, writer and coordinator of the Amin Gulgee Gallery in Karachi since its inception in 2000. It is published by Skira, a world-leading art-publisher based in Milan, Italy.
Centred between the two sets of essays are some 300 pages of images of Amin Gulgee’s work, beautifully photographed by Tapu Javeri, Asif Raza, Humayun Memon, Shamyl Khuro and Nafees. The inclusion of a QR code brings the performances back to life, giving what was ephemeral a hidden permanence.
But the book does not end there. At each book launch, Amin Gulgee gives us more. In an interview with the Ismaili Muslim initiative Simerg, he reveals the role of his mother in producing this monograph. In 2007 she asked him “I want you to do three things for me: one, give up smoking; two, do a book on your work; and three — I don’t remember now, but it will come to me.”
Each review offers new interpretations, becoming by default a personal encounter. Narendra Pachkhede’s poetic review for Naked Punch Review is a perfect example. He calls No Man’s Land a “psychic terrain” where “the body becomes site, the nation unravels, and the sacred is neither whole nor broken, but always in flux.”
The book is an experience, “a curatorial séance, a ritualised act of shared unknowing.” Amin Gulgee offers “a radical ethics of confusion. One that welcomes contradiction, cultivates friction and privileges encounter over resolution.” He calls the Amin Gulgee Gallery “a sanctuary for the fragmented.” And as the reader turns the last page, “One does not finish this book. One exits it, as from a dream half-remembered.”
Author H.M. Naqvi disentangles the overwrought threads of each feverishly excavated account into a disarmingly simple sentence: “Amin Gulgee demands attention... you cannot look away.”
The reviewer is a Karachi-based artist. She may be reached at durriyakazi1918@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 12th, 2025