Installation | Performance

Creator ········ Halar Soomro
Medium ········· Dance and Installation
Exhibited ······ April 2022

Venue ·········· Museum Dr.Guislain | Ghent,Belgium

Dhamal: The dance of Sindh

This piece aimed at establishing the polarizing attitudes towards psychiatry and treatment of people with mental illnesses in the global east and west throughout the latter half of this millennium. During these centuries, where mental health was being subjected to barbarous and inhumane ministration in the west in the name of social cleansing for the sane, in the east it was deemed holy, “Madness” was a sign of sanctitude, an attribute that gave rise to artistic expressions like “Dhamal”, which in its purest form, is a sub-continental trance dance designed to attain union with the divine. Stemming predominantly from the
region of Sindh in southern Pakistan.

With the inescapable desire to tell the stories of such empyreans and to honor the legacy of Sindh’s greatest, the artist created an installation of traditional regalia, instruments such as the anklets (Ghungroo) and the wooden claps (Chapri) with a projection of the artist performing a fusion of “Dhamal” and “Jhumir”. as never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation.