Zain Mustafa: Selected Works

Overview

Shidoni. Unity Faith Discipline 9/11/02

This clothes-line inspired installation draws its identity from universal values that transcend and shatter all man-made political boundaries by using "Kurtas", the unisex, beyond gender-clothing of Pakistan. The work creates a striking symbolism of an outer skin of clothing, a secondary architecture of shame, a constant remembrance of our mortality marred by social conditioning, veiled globally by culturally appropriate metaphors.

Kurtas historically transcend the impositions of gender roles. Their organic cotton structure is as colourful as all the spectrum blended into one. Kurtas represent a world with no differentiation, no segregation nor colour hierarchies, a freedom expressed in the virginal purity of white held up between this earth and our sky.

There is an inspired reference to the innocence, the naivete with which our second skins - the same skin that protects and hides the flesh that we are all made of - creates an important structure for the yin-yang split of private and public space. Simultaneously this "architecture" becomes the external, public vocabulary when washed and hung out to dry, telling all, symbiotically, of the private lives of the wearers.

The installation, using 21 kurtas, represents the three segments of life - the beginning, the middle and the end. Life is not only black and white. There is a third space, the line between the two, the real space we all exist in. Every seven years there is change in our lives. The 21 kurtas represent the non-linear, cyclic, constantly consistently re-energizing of life. The scale is a reference to perspective, our perspective towards each other, towards our environment and as an architectonic in space. The front of the Kurtas', aprons (daam'n) open as we move through them to reveal nature beyond the shell. This is the most private of spaces on the Kurtas, the region one metaphorically looks into first, before making any assumptions.

The artist was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1971, and has lived in New York City from 1989 until 2002, at which time he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unity Faith Discipline is his first conceptual installation sculpture in the western hemisphere and marks the advent of a new millennium.

Statement by the artist