Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Born in 1990 in Damascus (Syria)
Lives and works in San Francisco (USA)

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is an artist, curator and performer of mixed Pakistani and Lebanese descent and spent most of his life in Karachi, Pakistan but is now based in the U.S. Bhutto has exhibited his work extensively in the United States, as well as in Colombia, Pakistan and the U.A.E. He has a degree in Art History from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in Studio Art from the San Francisco Art Institute from where he graduated in 2016. He continues to work with galleries and institutions in San Francisco, such as Southern Exposure, SAFEHouse Arts and SOMArts.

In the works from the series Mussalmaan Musclemen on view at KB17, all images have been taken from a translation of a book supposedly originally written by Arnold Schwarzenegger, muscleman icon, actor and former governor of California. There is no true original English version as the book is a pirated mishmash of various books. This kaleidoscope of exercise manuals, alongside the Urdu translation and accompanying images of what appear to be white or white-passing men projects this book into a world of its own creation, existing neither completely in the East nor in the West. Rather, it occupies a liminal space. Bhutto explored this liminality by feminizing an otherwise ultra-masculine conversation. The artist scanned and printed these pages onto cotton fabric, blown up several times the size of the original; he then intervened by replacing hard muscle with soft flowery fabric and brightly colored embroidery thread, utilizing feminine practice to reveal the softness behind the muscle. The artist sought to create his own version of masculinity, making new men out of old ones and satirising the very serious and robust pride behind bodybuilding by inserting elements of humor and playfulness into it.