Curatorial note

Artists and Collaborators Artists: Namoos Bukhari, Taha Ahmad, Suvani Suri, Moonis Ahmad Shah, Khandakar Ohida, Mo'min Swaitat, Nida Mehboob, Nithin Shams, Imaad Majeed, Kaighazi Pairahan Library

Curated by Najrin Islam

What words can we then possibly use to describe the humanitarian ordeal we have been witnessing? Could we be rendering its affect blunt by even attempting to embed it in a language we understand? How could we exceed this representational trap and still process the sights in comprehensible terms? Against this lexical inadequacy, we continue to process absence through images of death and destruction. The absence registers in graves, in flattened land, in the want of familiar touch. And now, how does one refuse the systemic erasure of this absence?

In this exhibition, artists from different contexts of (post)colonial resistance share a space in assertion of a collective presence. In this space, fiction, oral histories, and speculation come together to create a haptic document of solidarity. In this act of being together, the artists create a generative space of illegibility, whereby dissenting voices overlay each other in a dense skein to confuse the gaze of the system. They rupture the neat narratives peddled in the mainstream media, and manifest in the form of apparitions, traces, azaans, and whispers between eager ears. They refuse the limits of the margin, and claim space through leakage. They do not demand a spectacular confrontation to be countered as an event, but manifest as a surreptitious set of tactics that seeks to destabilise the microphysics of majoritarian power—in seismic realignment towards an otherwise. The exhibition seeks to disassemble the Muslim body as a victim and build its image in terms of its lived histories across transnational contexts as well as the dreams it harbours beyond the constraints of those contexts. The insistence of the apparatus on this body’s discursive legibility, and simultaneously, invisibility, is countered by the artists through a sustained display of tenacity against systemic duress. Refusing the registration of this body as a number, a threat, or a misspelled name, they explore its conflicting records as both omission and its refusal.

About the Artists

Namoos Bukhari

Namoos Bukhari was born and partly brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. This exploration is to incubate the participants in the audience within a sensorium of sorts. The point is to make it Intelligible to the mind, Legible to the eyes and Sensible to an infinite pattern of senses, by employing distinct peculiarities of the mediums of performance, image, speech, text and sound. 

Taha Ahmad 

Taha Ahmad is a documentary photographer based in Delhi. He was born in Lucknow, in 1994. He developed an interest in Documentary photography while pursuing his bachelor’s degree. He feels photography has a strong influence in creating and developing discourse for the future. His photographs are framed in a way that preserves their reality, which he feels is undergoing an everlasting change.

Suvani Suri

Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, objects, installations, fictions, experimental workshops, and live interventions.

Moonis Ahmad

Moonis Ahmad (b. 1992, Kashmir) is a visual artist whose practice transverses various media, including installation, sculpture, computer programming, sound, and video. His work conjures the afterlives of the dead and the deceased as a means to speculate the emergence of counter-worlds that challenge established states of power at the margins.

Khandakar Ohida

Khandakar Ohida is a visual artist and film practitioner working between Kolkata and New Delhi, India. Her interests span lens-based media, film installations, drawings, and paintings, influenced by her surroundings, including personal memories, marginalized voices, post-colonial imagination, collective protests, resistance, and non-linear narratives that interact with various societal layers.

Momin Swaitat

Mo’min Swaitat is a London-based Palestinian Bedouin actor, filmmaker, music producer, DJ and archivist from Jenin. He trained at the Freedom Theatre, Jenin and arthaus (formerly LISPA), London and Berlin, before moving to London. 

Nida Mehboob

Nida Mehboob is a photographer & filmmaker based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated as a pharmacist but left the field and started photography. Since then she has been doing documentary projects including few short films. She has received her diploma in photography from Pathshala Southasian Media Institute in 2019. She is currently finishing her master studies in documentary fillmmaking at Aalto University, Helsinki.

Nithin Shams

Nithin Shams’ artistic practice is centered around opening sonic portals to facilitate listeners to enter an open, empathetic, and attentive state of mind. Guided by intuitive processes and practices of deep listening, Nithin composes and curates listening spaces aimed at blurring the boundaries between the self and the other, opening up a space for reflection as well as slowness. 

Imaad Majeed

Multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Kaghazi Parihan Library

Kaghazi Pairahan is a travelling library of photobooks, dummies, artist books, zines, posters, digital publications, and pamphlets, which weave stories and histories of resistance in South Asia. This exhibition celebrates the symbolic 'Clothes Made of Paper', a metaphor derived from an ancient Persian tradition symbolising a quest for justice. It serves as an archive, capturing personal and political resistance across history and contemporary narratives, and promoting alternative, progressive viewpoints through artistic protests.