When I used the term “Muslim body” in my curatorial note* for an exhibition in New Delhi last year, I did not anticipate the extent to which it would draw institutional ire. I had used it as an affirmative assertion of identity, and in acknowledgment of the humanitarian horrors that Muslim peoples across geopolitical contexts have endured at the hands of (neo)colonial structures of power. Moving beyond the imperative of religion, I emphasized the need to disassemble the notion of the Muslim body as a victim and (re)build its image in relation to lived histories across transnational contexts. Rendered invisible through the state’s concerted efforts toward disenfranchisement even as this very erasure makes the stigmatization of Muslim identity hypervisible, the Muslim body is vulnerable to censorship in both art and life. With the advantage of distance and perspective, I write this essay as an attempt to review the acts of censorship that were mounted against my exhibition. I look at how the representatives of a cultural institution articulated their constraints on the exhibition through editorial omissions and substitutions, their exhaustive approach to the curatorial texts further attesting to the insidious workings of the global art world’s political machinery.
As I try to understand my experience, I have repeatedly returned to Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997). In this book, Butler argues that speech can injure, and writes about how an injurious name carries with it the history of past usage, which determines the weight of its utterance in the present. I wonder: What does the word Muslim invoke in contemporary majoritarian parlance? Does it arouse dread, suspicion, disgust? Why does it compel a sudden dip in decibel in an otherwise ordinary sentence? The word’s pejorative force accrues through its use as an invective in the public sphere, whereby it reinflicts the injury of Muslim peoples’ subjugation under majoritarian apparatuses of power. But thinking alongside Butler’s views, I also wonder: Does language operate the same way as a person or a people? Are there ways in which this body may exceed the weight of its utterance and determine the coordinates of its own image? By extension, how can the Muslim body reclaim its image from institutional conditions of representation?
Installation view of Taha Ahmad’s A Displaced Hope, 2015–20, in Notes on Omission, 2024. Courtesy of Ravi Kumar and Prameya Art Foundation, 2024.
I began conceptualizing this exhibition in March 2023, during a spring residency in Mandelieu-la-Napoule in southeastern France. I spent a month in the Château de la Napoule with international peers, revisiting the various personal essays I had written about my formative experiences and observations as a Muslim woman in India. I also spent that time reading, expanding my understanding through literature and discursive engagements to prepare a proposal for the exhibition that is now at the center of this essay. The artists I included in the exhibition, held at Galerie Romain Rolland at Alliance Française de Delhi, drew upon transcontinental resonances to assert the presence of the Muslim body—Nithin Shams and Imaad Majeed did so by researching the shared act of calling azaans; Suvani Suri dug through colonial archives to arrive at peripheral voices recorded by accident. Taha Ahmad called attention to how administrative bodies perpetuate superstition by looking at a community in Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi that, having lost faith in the state, has continued to place its faith in what he refers to as a “ministry of djinns.” Namoos Bukhari looked at how survivors of injuries from pellet shotguns in Kashmir—used by the military in violation of humanitarian laws—live with altered perception; a series of colored blobs on canvases index the way these injuries affect survivors, mapping how common sensations become uncanny. Moonis Ahmad Shah also considered Kashmir’s landscape, focusing on how its beauty is fetishized in ways that minimize state conflict. A traveling library of politically engaged literature, named Kaghazi Pairahan (an Urdu phrase translating to “clothes made of paper”), was set up in the gallery and further documented the transhistorical pulse of the Muslim body and its exigencies, attesting to the enduring power of the written word and its tactile influence. The library included the publication A Survival Guide for Ahmadi Muslims of Pakistan (2021), in which author Nida Mehboob indicts the systemic persecution of the titular community through a set of ironic (and unsettling) tips for coping with it. In another room, Khandakar Ohida dreamt up a museum of ordinary objects amassed by a demure man in rural Bengal, dissipating the prohibitory protocols of imperial thinking.
As I imagined this exhibition, I was trying in particular to respond to the need for repair in the art scene, especially given how frequently institutions tokenize Muslim artists to signal progressive programming. The works of these artists have been continually appropriated to suit a version of liberal politics that is encouraged in the global art market, but this art is embraced only when its political commentary can be presented using vague euphemisms that do not directly indict any potential stakeholder. This tokenization frequently occurs alongside cases of intellectual theft from marginalized bodies—evident in the recent controversy around established artist and curator Anita Dube’s appropriation of the young poet and activist Amir Aziz’s poem “Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega (Everything Will Be Remembered)” (2020). Dube embroidered Aziz’s words, without attribution, onto artworks comprised of a patchwork of velvet. Protesters had used the lines of the same poem as a clarion call during public demonstrations in India against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, two policies introduced by the incumbent government in a covert, discriminatory measure against the country’s resident Muslim population. Displayed in the rarefied space of an art gallery and put up for sale without credit to or compensation for Aziz (a deficit only exacerbated by an insensitive “apology” post by Dube), Dube’s artwork highlights how caste privilege plays out in the Indian art scene. Actors like Dube, who are already at an advantage from an asymmetrical distribution of resources, co-opt the art of less privileged contemporaries and purport to perform solidarity while actually profiting off grassroots radicalism.
Even if the liberal politics of contemporary cultural institutions made my exhibition’s subject initially attractive, the current political context made my focus on the Muslim body especially fraught for at least one of these institutions. Much has already been written about the bias around media coverage of the genocide in Gaza since October 2023, with disproportionate attention on Israeli deaths, the use of euphemisms like “conflict” to soften Israel’s liability, and the effort to curb popular dissent by labeling any critique of the genocide “antisemitism.” These tactics cumulatively shape how the public consumes news about the genocide, while simultaneously offering cultural institutions sympathetic to Israel a playbook for negotiating opposition within their respective constitutions. I may have experienced tactics from this playbook. In December 2024, Alliance Française de Delhi (AFD) hosted my exhibition in association with Prameya Art Foundation (PRAF) and Institut Français Inde (IFI)—the latter are longtime partners on the incredibly generative Château de la Napoule residency. While PRAF had readily accepted and supported this exhibition proposal, I was circumspect about the enthusiasm the new venue partner, AFD, initially directed toward my curatorial idea, as I was aware of its diplomatic position and the associated constraints that might affect the exhibition.
Installation view of Namoos Bukhari’s A Secret History of Injustice, 2018-ongoing, in Notes on Omission, 2024. Courtesy of Ravi Kumar and Prameya Art Foundation.
It is a fallacy to presume that art is protected against the structural asymmetries that characterize lived realities, as if enclosed within a hermetic bubble. Because I knew this, and I was unsure about just how far I could howl within the space of this cultural institution, I engaged in an implicit exercise in self-censorship while penning the curatorial note, conscious that my contractual acceptance of AFD as the host institution limited the ways in which I could be truthful. For instance, I made no mention of Palestine or Israel by name. Instead, I gestured to the genocide by acknowledging the inadequacy of language when it comes to processing the continuously accumulating images of death and destruction. In the note, I refer to how a “chronic catastrophe” (Ariella Azoulay’s terminology) fools the laws of visibility by slipping through language. I trusted that the discerning reader would grasp my intended meaning, as I endeavored to use evocative understatements to subvert the suppressive impulses of majoritarian power and, at the same time, avoid potential interdictions from AFD.
Despite these efforts, the day before the exhibition opened, my curatorial note—printed on vinyl and exhibited on the gallery wall—became a site of intense contestation. An important representative from AFD protested my covert references to the genocide in Gaza and demanded that the text be altered lest any French dignitaries (whose presence was not guaranteed at the opening) felt uncomfortable. The hours until the exhibition opening comprised a tug-of-war between the on-site representatives of PRAF and AFD, with the former arguing in favor of my authorial integrity. I was later told that the AFD representative had wanted to drop the entire concluding paragraph of the note, which made mention of the “Muslim body.” After retracting this demand on PRAF’s insistence, the AFD representative, using AFD’s diplomatic position in India as grounds, compromised by condensing their demands into three editorial omissions:
What words can we then possibly use to describe the humanitarian horrors we have been witnessing for a year?
The state’s insistence on this body’s discursive legibility, and simultaneously, invisibility, is countered by the artists through a sustained display of tenacity against systemic duress.
These were the substitutions I agreed upon:
What words can we then possibly use to describe the humanitarian ordeals we have been witnessing?
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.
The AFD representative, acting in the interest of the institution, excised from my curatorial note words and phrases that they might have deemed even remotely confrontational or inclined to provoke factual insight. Butler argues that such acts of censorship come from a fear of contamination: words, composed by an independent curator in this instance, threaten to subsume the institution’s stance on the matter under discussion, thereby undermining the apolitical facade it has carefully cultivated for its regular public. The institution’s paranoia over curatorial subversion precluded the possibility of dialogue or any other more reasonable cautionary measures.
The AFD representative had succeeded in securing my initial editorial substitutions by abusing the pressure of time and my own curatorial commitment to the participating artists, but I met their subsequent explicit, last-minute demands for further changes with counter-pressure. When they demanded that I either change the word apparatus or pluralize it to divert attention from what I assume they thought was a reference to Israel—it was not, at least not exclusively so—I threatened to walk out of the exhibition opening. Following a discussion with a PRAF representative over this ultimatum, the AFD representative retracted this demand, and no further stipulations ensued. But the matter was far from over.
During their welcome address, the AFD representative artfully refused to hand the microphone over to me or any representative from PRAF after their own speech, even though we had all previously agreed to give remarks. The evening was laced with tension, with the AFD publicly registering its distance and apathy toward an exhibition that did not fit the ethos of its regular, politically cautious programming. It may not be too far-fetched to assume, then, that had the AFD representative taken issue with the curatorial note or the exhibition content any earlier (they were conveyed all the information weeks in advance), the featured artworks would have been at risk of institutional censure as well. Even at this late moment, they may have tried to pull artworks from the exhibition had I not been there on site. My presence (enabled by IFI’s fiscal largesse) seemed to preclude such an intervention and ensured that the outrage remained concentrated on the curatorial text.
A poster for This Desire is a Cipher, a planned film screening that did not occur. Courtesy of the author.
Cultural institutions like the AFD espouse high-flying rhetoric about artistic freedom, and yet this experience with censorship revealed the glaring misalignment behind this rhetoric. Knowing that structural inequities determine the limits of this freedom, I struggled with my own response to the situation. Should I have refused these omissions to my curatorial note and instead made a public spectacle of my withdrawal? Could my refusal have shifted the parameters of free expression? Or was it a better call to agree to the edits in order to continue to use the space for the exhibition so it could reach a wider public? The censorship was an exercise in scopic control, and while refusing the edits might have been the clearest ethical response to the predicament, I was aware that such withdrawal would also have ceded complete control to the institution. I viewed my reluctant acquiescence to AFD’s demands as a curatorial compromise that allowed me to honor the time and labor of the participating artists, most of whom had trusted me with their work without receiving an honorarium for their participation. By this point, the bonds of trust I had forged over a year of preparation had become personal and precious. I decided to fulfill my obligations to the artists by continuing to collaborate with AFD, using the institutional space to broadcast my oppositional opinion through curatorial walkthroughs and conversations during the two-week exhibition.
The institution’s attempt to censor became more explicit following opening night, with the AFD representative discrediting my labor and the labor of the artists by casting aspersions on our intentions and attempting to control the exhibition’s reception. These attempts extended into the public programming around the exhibition. The AFD representative agreed to circulate only the vaguest versions of event descriptions on social media. In a post promoting a lecture-performance by Majeed, the word erasure—used by the artist to refer to the existing archive of Sufi sonics in Sri Lanka—was changed to “more and more endangered” because the AFD representative insisted that the institution was uncomfortable with strong action verbs. Besides insisting on this absurd substitution, the AFD representative further asked to pre-screen the films I had carefully selected for a program toward the end of the exhibition’s run, presumably to review them for content the AFD might find objectionable. Titled This Desire Is a Cipher, the collateral program of seven short films was intended to foreground how women’s experiences in conflict zones around the world percolated into landscapes, public memory, and the histories of film itself. These films recognize women as the primary bearers of generational trauma and explore “desire” as it manifests through prohibitory touch, furtive glances, digital fractures, and loud, lyrical lament for loved ones now lost or disappeared. Not wishing to subject these personal essays to the institution’s parochial gaze, I pulled the film program entirely.
In a 2020 essay, the writer Andreas Petrossiants poses a series of questions for cultural workers caught in similar quagmires: “How complicit am I? Can I still critique while inside? How to subvert while maintaining my autonomy? . . . How much autonomy can one relinquish? What is the border between the museum and the statist, racialized, capitalist, neocolonial, gendered violence that produces its material wealth?” I fought with these questions intensely while navigating AFD’s disregard for my curatorial attempt to resist essentializing narratives that would have reduced the exhibition to identitarian binaries—to that loathed word Muslim, which is so often received as a threat in civic spaces. AFD’s intolerance for my curatorial agency conveyed obeisance to a bureaucratized power structure and inability to engage in the kind of open and responsible debate that could have made their operating protocols transparent and, possibly, encouraged trust. While AFD was sympathetic to the way my curatorial approach advocated solidarity around the Muslim body in the beginning, its representatives became uncomfortable when they began to feel that the institution’s position was endangered through this body’s material claim to their space.
Installation view of Mo’min Swaitat’s Palestinian Sound Archive, ongoing, in Notes on Omission, 2024. Courtesy of Ravi Kumar and Prameya Art Foundation.
In conceptualizing this exhibition during the residency, I was trying to advocate for the kind of repair that I hoped to see in an art scene where Muslim artists and their work are tokenized and appropriated to suit the global art market’s liberal politics. The constellations of power within cultural institutions, restructured under the weight of right-wing majoritarianism in India, demand scrutiny, especially given how they render marginalized artists vulnerable to intellectual theft and/or abuse in the public sphere—including on social media, where my peers have received derogatory comments for work that explicitly established concern for Muslim communities. The demand for institutional greasing is met by curators and administrators, with stories of such complicity further resulting in a loss of confidence among artists, who can no longer trust claims of institutional autonomy. Contemporary artists have been finding alternative ways to exhibit their art—whether through peer-driven workshops, on the street, through publishing, or using surreptitious tactics to express their politics when they do show in institutions—and in doing so, claiming space for expression irrespective of institutional tenets.
Acts of censorship such as AFD’s further reify barriers while ironically catalyzing what the institution would prefer to erase. This is where I again think of Butler’s take on the generative power of censorship, and how it produces discourse instead of squashing it. Close to the entrance of my exhibition at the gallery, I placed a table featuring cassette-tape cases from the Palestinian Sound Archive, and visitors were welcome to put on headphones to listen to a curated playlist of Palestinian tracks from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s—all archived and restored by artist Mo’min Swaitat. In one of these tracks, a wedding procession in Jenin is briefly interrupted by the sound of a fighter jet in the sky. But once out of earshot, the celebration resumes as usual. This nuance would have been lost on the institution.
*Find the original curatorial note for the Notes on Omission exhibition here.
