we refuse_d: Curator’s note

we refuse_d unfolded organically over a few months rather than through a master plan. Early on, we discussed the emblematic Salon des Refusés held in Paris in 1863, a counter-exhibition that showcased major artists of western modernism, such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Camille Pissarro. The Refusés had represented a space for counter-narratives to academic art, traditional canons, mainstream discourses and the art market. We engaged with the possibility of reflecting on the role and canon of art and the salons of the time, and how they, like the mega museum exhibitions, the mega-galleries today, colluded with power, money, and prevailing ideologies, or chose silence and non-commitment, hence failing to realise their connectivity to society.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of artists have been censored or excluded from art fairs, exhibitions, and other public programs in Western countries due to their stance on conflicts, war, and political uprisings. More recently, in the context of the geopolitical divide generated by the genocidal war on Palestine, artists, academics, writers, and musicians have been cancelled, censored, discredited, threatened, and have faced financial retribution and condemnation. The most striking advocates of intimidation and blacklisting have been academic institutions, news organisations, and cultural venues.

In reaction, many artists have decided to withdraw from exhibitions and cultural events, often at the expense of their careers. While for some making art may represent a means of resilience in responding to urgency, the trauma of loss can equally lead to the refusal or incapacity to create, research, and produce intellectual or artistic work. At that moment, our reference to Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay, We Refugees, provided an anchor. We decided to treat refusal as a potential for action, resistance, and repair, and, overall, as a way of claiming agency.

Early on, we had decided that the exhibition would begin with Samia Halaby and that we would revisit her cancelled retrospective at the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University (2024) in some capacity. We desired a project where positions would operate as a coherent, flowing, and fluctuating narrative, not as propaganda— although that is fine as well—but rather as an exhibition with diversity, complexity, and subtle responses to immediacy.  There are invisible threads that hold the project together.

A vital thread amongst them is that many artists double as cultural workers, “institution” builders and sustainers, who care deeply about place, context and community;  DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), with the residency, the Tree School and other projects, Emily Jacir with Dar Jacir, Suha Shoman with Darat al Funun, Khalil Rabah with Al Riwaq, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh with the Arab Image Foundation.

There are a few institutions in Europe, and none in the US, that would support a project like this. Mathaf was the right place. We were not being heroic, defiant or opportunistic but merely making an exhibition that is relevant and timely. We believed it was essential to claim the exhibition’s agency and to exploit its potential as a form of speech not reduced to dictation or recipes. It may be apt to pose questions to numerous institutions worldwide and ask, “What have you done when…?” As in Walid Raad and Pierre Huyghebaert’s wall installation, the vinyl wall text, applied ad nauseam, reads: “Leadership told him they wanted to avoid picking a side.”

In the exhibition, artists from four generations come together in solidarity around divergent practices. We do what we can to stay sane, encourage a sense of community, express different forms of speech through our practices, hold on to our histories, find our places in them, and keep them alive, revisiting them through the lens of the present. Taysir Batniji, Majd Abdel Hamid, Oraib Toukan, and Khalil Rabah practise at an intimate level to persist and to remain sane. Nour Shantout, Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, yasmine eid sabbagh, DAAR, Suha Shoman, Jumana Manna, and Emily Jacir visit histories from individual to communal, to speak to the present. Zarara, Manna and Toukan are engaged with poetry and the written word. These are a few of the threads that hold the exhibition together.

As curators, a Turk and an Egyptian-Swiss, we are on the margins; the artists lived it and live it. We refused to articulate the exhibition in a way that makes the viewer a privileged bystander to victimhood. Getting into the details of biographies, individual stories of loss would be pornographic and drive a deep wedge between the exhibition and the onlooker.

The works in the exhibition collectively reject narratives of victimisation by asserting instead the artist’s agency through gestures that are subtle and, at times, poetic, embodying multiple forms of resistance.

About the curators

Nadia Radwan is an art historian and curator specialising in Middle Eastern modernism, currently serving as the head of Visual Arts at HEAD – Geneva and founder of the Manazir platform for visual arts in the MENA region.

Vasıf Kortun is a Turkish curator and writer, best known as the founding director of SALT and Platform Garanti in Istanbul, and for curating the 3rd and 9th Istanbul Biennials as well as the 2008 Taipei Biennial.