Experiencing quantum entanglement in Amin Gulgee’s art show

The Canvas Gallery is hosting an art exhibition featuring works by Amin Gulgee. Titled ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, the show will run at the gallery until February 16.

“To invoke teleportation is to enter into the realm of science fiction; a window into the future imagined by Star Trek and others,” the catalogue released by the gallery quotes curator Adam Fahy-Majeed as saying.

“To invoke the quantum is to enter into a realm in which the bizarre and counter-intuitive is the most fundamental basis of our reality. Yet we live in a world in which the intersection of both — quantum teleportation — is not just fiction, nor thought experiment.

“It is at the frontier of scientific knowledge and inquiry; a validated field that is constantly evolving. It is based on quantum entanglement: in which two or more particles become correlated with each other so that they behave as if they are single units.

“Changing the properties of one particle in an entangled pair will immediately change the other, no matter how far apart they are.... Quantum entanglement was famously derided by Albert Einstein as ‘spukhafte Fernwirkung’, the quote which gives its name to this exhibition: ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’.

“It is now thought that entanglement occurs between hundreds, millions and even more particles; the phenomenon taking place throughout nature, among the atoms and molecules in living species, and within metals and other materials. When multitudes of particles become entangled, they still act as a unified object.

“This is clearly an intoxicating thought when considering Amin Gulgee’s sculpture. Not only is it comprised of copper — a cosmic material imparted on our planet by a process of nucleosynthesis, then the subsequent death and supernovae explosions of massive stars.

“It entails that the particles, molecules and atoms making up this copper are entangled within a web-like corpus that connects each piece created on a quantum level. The idea of quantum teleportation interrelates with all the works in the exhibition, and more generally in Amin’s extensive oeuvre....

“When contemplating the quantum within art, rather than physics, it almost becomes easier to grasp, especially given Amin’s artistic praxis. He doesn’t sketch or draw his pieces in advance; he creates them organically as if the entangled photons of all previous artistic experimentation provide the underlying momentum for new inspiration.

“Moreover, throughout his trajectory, he has been elaborating on different entanglements within his wider web of artistic creation. Every work that he makes is in a constant state of quantum entanglement; sharing information on a level which changes the state of the next work to be produced.

“That has been an underlying curatorial idea in this exhibition. To emphasise the information which passes from work to work, project to project, strand to strand, thread to thread, form to form. A process of constant, quantum evolution, and revelation.

“In ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, we can observe some of this quantum information manifesting itself in a new state, a new form of expression, in Amin’s ‘Shadow Letters’.

“It takes the strand of the calligraphic in his oeuvre, the specific thread of a deconstructed line from the ‘Iqra’, elaborating it in the form of engraving glass and layering it with silver leaf.

“It takes the quantum information from moments of algorithmic projection in his multimedia work, ‘Algorithm VII’, and petrifies them within time and space.

“The usage of a seemingly flat surface to establish a multi-dimensional play of light, shadow and metal is entangled with the ‘Perforated Scroll’, which again punctuates space with an assemblage of the seven deconstructed constituents appropriated from the ‘Iqra’, in the Naskh script.

“This is then given further expression on the vertical plane by ‘Ascension’. The ‘Non-binary Cube’ shares the quantum information of scale in Amin’s artistic praxis, observable in ‘The Iron Horn’.

“Although it ostensibly seems not to be calligraphic, given its geometric form, it is a further addition to the thread of Square Kufic script with the invocation ‘Alhamdulillah’.

“It is a perfectly asymmetrical cube — in that it is totally cubic in its occupation of space, yet absolutely distinct in the view from each of its sides due to the internal mechanics of its elaboration.

“In ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’, it acts as a strangely cardiovascular centre, pumping its energy around the exhibition. It is important to note that this teleportation of information and inspiration between works is not linear. The quantum realm is underpinned by the idea of superposition; that particles exist in multiple states at once.

“When an experiment is performed, it is as if the particles only then select one of the states in the superposition. That is how, in Amin Gulgee’s quantum realm, this thread of the ‘Iqra’ can also take an arachnidian form, as seen in ‘Spider’.

“Even though it shares this aspect of quantum information with other works weaved along this thread, its Tolkienian presence in space seems to visually share more with a new creation, ‘The Iron Horn’.

“This organic form lies in a liminal zone, somewhere between a cornucopia and a fossil from some distant, prehistoric past; or perhaps a relic from an imagined world of fantasy — much like the calligraphic arachnid....

“As I have been considering the artistic practice of Amin Gulgee through the lens of quantum teleportation and entanglement, I am constantly reminded of the words of Zeilinger, one of the pioneering physicists who has proved this physical reality through decades of experimentation:

“’My personal understanding is that entanglement tells us that our notions of time and space are too simple. Maybe two locations that are different are not that different... Also, our notions of what this reality is are limited... My feeling is that what lies in this quantum information is a fundamental constituent of our world.’

“For me, Zeilinger’s profound postulations are embodied in an artistic sense by Amin’s ‘Entangled Tower’. It is a work that is neither wholly new nor old, and that exists in multiple locations at the same time, all enmeshed into a unified object.

“It is the quantum entanglement of two pieces, two threads — hands and self-portraiture of the face. Through their deconstruction, and subsequent re-assemblage as a singular whole, they are teleporting their most fundamental information through time and space; thus forming its present, unified state.”

Amin Gulgee is an artist-curator living and working in Karachi. He received a BA in art history and economics from the Yale University, USA, in 1987 and won the Conger B Goodyear Fine Arts Award for his senior thesis on Moghul gardens.

He works primarily in sculpture, installation and performance. He has worked extensively with performance, both as a practitioner and a curator. Over the past two decades, he has conceived 35 performance works of his own, including ‘Triangle’, which he presented at the Moghul-era Lahore Fort in March 2022.

He has also curated numerous group exhibitions at his eponymous non-commercial gallery in Karachi and elsewhere, and was chief curator of the inaugural Karachi Biennale in 2017. He has received numerous awards, including the President’s Pride of Performance, one of the country’s highest civilian honours.