The multilayered tapestry of forms and narratives in Pakistani art is a continuum of traditional concerns. It is within these polarities that the social discourse resides. Can art embrace what is out there and within, sans self-censorship? That was the question at a recent performance work at Arts Council, Karachi. Titled ‘Where’s the Apple?’ and conceived by Amin Gulgee, it engaged with the nature of artistic form of movement, sound, objects and the human body itself.

An earlier work, ‘Riwayiti: One night stand’ (2013), comprised of cross-discipline artists to converge in simultaneous performances packed with beauty, violence and celebration.

A similar duality of making and unmaking, connecting and disconnecting remerges in this performance, located around the Mughal concept of gardens, the Charbagh. This artist’s Charbagh is a space that he has nurtured for over two decades; a garden that has given him love and refuge, despite the conflict and pain that resides within and around it. In desperate pursuit of pairing the material and the intangible, the decorative and the abstract, he has located the feminine in the masculine, and vice versa, in his own garden.

Part and whole, the Charbagh in ‘Where’s the Apple?’ is enacted in three parts: inside, outside and becoming the Charbagh. The original garden where four pathways once found a central meeting point and where trees bore fruit is no more. The fruit is set ablaze, and the central meeting point is a stage of disruption articulated by violent gesture and sound.

The main prop is a sheet of reflective plastic, divided into four equal squares, with surrounding leaves in copper partially visible in the reflected surface. Hung by fish-netting wire, these leaves perhaps symbolise the fragility of carnal connections enacted with utmost sensuality. Light only appears or is “revealed” as a reflection, in fragments. Oil lamps placed on the four corners of the bagh herald an urgency; a crisis where the personal and political become one.

An earlier version of the garden consisted of a 3D metallic grid with four divisions, in which the viewer could enter the work, walk on the sand and touch the giant copper leaves, hung by the fragile fish-net wire. In the present work, the drama unfolds at a distance.

The performer, Joshinder Chaggar takes centre stage, along with other actors who become a reflection of the artist’s imagination. This is a shift in Gulgee’s work where he bares open his vulnerabilities, exposing, extending himself to his milieu. And in that embrace, he disrupts the accepted norms of human sexuality and the role of the artist.

The location, outside the insularity of the private gallery, reinforces that rupture. Staged, but enacted in the tradition of storytelling, or daastangoi, there is a different textural layer to the viewer/art, dynamics.

As an author and artist, he places himself outside the (physical) frame with the viewers. There appears an underlying narrative of self-reflection here and also a narcissistic seeking, manifested in the mirroring of the image of the self. Mirroring society, the artist thus opens his inner garden to the theatrics of joy, sorrow, violence, confusion, sound, noise, encompassing the cross disciplinary: visual art, fashion, design, music and theatre.

It is inside the discordant Charbagh from where emerge the layers of Gulgee’s larger narrative. The perfect symmetry of the Kufic script intertwined with the imperfections of the beaten/welded metal in the shape of the recurring womb and egg have been a constant point of inspiration, negotiation and obsession; where the artist emerges out of the womb in an angry gesture that dares to play with fire.