Faye Corthésy: we refuse_d is an exhibition that was made in reaction to the cancellation of many Arab artists and intellectuals in Western museums and cultural institutions following the war on Palestine.[note]An overview of the exhibition held at Mathaf, Doha, is published on ISSUE here.[/note] Many of them also withdrew their participation from residencies and prizes in reaction. The idea of co-curating this exhibition apparently came quite spontaneously. Could you tell us how you came to work together on this project, how it all started?

Vasıf Kortun: First, I’d like to say that when people invest many years in preparing exhibitions, they lose sight of the present. They risk forfeiting relevance and urgency, which may also be a convenient way to avoid a public discussion. There’s a strong possibility that the subject in question is already desperately outdated. Museums are often deliberately structured to conceive projects for the far future, which can keep them out of touch with daily realities and urgencies.

We certainly felt the urgency of the moment as we were building up the exhibition: there’s a genocide going on, there’s a war on a country of unforeseen scale on civilian space. There was always this tension behind us. It affected us, the exhibition, and more particularly the artists participating in it. One would hope that things would resolve themselves in an equitable and just way, but it’s hard to expect this from the world or from politics today. 

Concretely, what happened was that Nadia was in Doha for research at Mathaf and she started a conversation with Zeina Arida, the director of the Museum. The conversation pivoted around the idea of refusal. That’s when the plan for the exhibition started. Zeina suggested that we work together, which was a fantastic idea.

F. C.: Did you know each other before working on the exhibition?

V. K.:  We knew each other only through communicating online: we had started talking about the Mathaf Encyclopedia for which I’m working as an editor, and about the online publication Manazir that Nadia co-founded.

The original idea for the exhibition was predicated on the notion of refusal, and on European modes of refusal such as the Salon des Refusés in 19^th century France. This was the starting point and then we built it into a concrete, urgent, and exciting project.

Nadia Radwan: We had been witnessing this wave of cancellation of artists not receiving their residencies, or prizes, of scholars losing their jobs, all over Europe and the United States. Amongst these, one important event was cancelled: The retrospective of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, which was to take place at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University in February 2024. Its sudden cancellation in December 2023 shocked many people in our circles.[note]See Elaine Velie, “Indiana University Cancels Palestinian Artist Samia Halaby’s Exhibition,” Hyperallergic, 10^th January 2024, https://hyperallergic.com/indiana-university-cancels-palestinian-artist-samia-halaby-exhibition/[/note] Samia, who is a leading figure of abstract painting, was stunned and hurt, of course: she’s been living in the United States since the age of fourteen, and this retrospective was meant to be an important event marking the culmination of her career.

F. C.: Was Samia Halaby the first artist you invited? How did you select the fifteen artists who take part in the exhibition? In the introductory text to the exhibition, you mention an “ongoing dialogue” with the artists: how did this dialogue take place? Was there also a conversation between the artists?

V. K.: The first artist included in the exhibition was Samia. The context was traumatic. For example, our colleague Tirdad Zolghadr, who is now curator at Mathaf, lost his teaching position at the University of Arts Berlin. His wife, Oraib Toukan, is one of the artists in the exhibition. Two extremely competent colleagues with a child and nowhere to go. They ended up in Doha. There are also other artists who were officially cancelled, such as Jumana Manna.[note]See Kerstin Stakemeier, “Ruined Sense/s: Jumana Manna at Heidelberger Kunstverein, an Exhibition That Wasn’t,” Mousse Magazine, 27^th February 2024, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/jumana-manna-kerstin-stakemeier-heidelberger-kunstverein-2024/[/note] And there are artists that institutions do not even begin considering. That kind of cancellation cannot be stated or proved, but it’s extremely common.

The trajectory we conceived for the exhibition started with Samia and ended with Jumana: This is not relevant to the exhibition's narrative, but it’s relevant to us as exhibition makers. There are certain things we discovered in the process of making and installing the exhibition: there were many common threads between the artists that we probably had in the back of our minds, but had not articulated from the start.

We did not have a collective discussion with the artists, but most of them are already in conversation because they know each other. Their works have been shown together in exhibitions; they are colleagues. However, we did speak to each artist individually at length and frequently. The discussions evolved around what we wanted to do with this exhibition and how the individual works would find themselves in relation to the others in the project.

Because of the depth of the works, each artist had their own space. The works are not connected through a simple narrative. They are in relation, but physically hold their own space. It was quite critical that each presence had internal coherence. They are not samples placed to prove a narrative set up by the curators.

N. R.: It’s important to underline that most of the works were commissions. We were in conversation with the artists about their works, the notion of refusal, and the current situation, which was affecting everyone so strongly. This is why we had numerous conversations: we were speaking and reflecting on the works in progress while also exchanging about the tragic events that were unfolding every day. Someone like Walid Raad directly engaged with the concept of refusal to create a meta-narrative of the entire exhibition through his installation made in collaboration with Pierre Huyghebaert. Others touched upon refusal in one way or another. Maybe what gives the show its overall coherence is that the artists occupy the space that would usually be given to narration.

F. C: You spoke about the notion of refusal that is central to the exhibition, starting from its title. “we refuse_d” suggests a shift from passive to active, from being refused to refusing. You say that refusal is not only an act of dissent, but also an act of care. It’s a powerful shift that reverses the violence of being refused.

N. R.:  We didn’t want to do an exhibition about the notion of cancellation because being cancelled does not give you any form of agency. Refusal does. This is why, even though many of the artists in the exhibition have suffered from cancellation, we focused on the idea of refusal, which encompasses the notions of resistance and persistence.

I refuse to stop making art. I refuse to stop writing, to stop expressing myself. I refuse to die. I refuse to stop caring. This became the backbone of the exhibition.

The title has a sonority that echoes Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay “We Refugees.”[note]Available online on documenta 14’s website: https://www.documenta14.de/de/south/35_we_refugees[/note] It’s a text about resilience that is a sort of shared claim for a “universal” (even if I don’t like that word) condition of facing war and trauma, having to leave one’s home, being in exile.

V. K.: One can say that it’s an exhibition that leaves the West out. It doesn’t owe anything to the West as a category. Currently, the space that refuses artists publicly, or in ways that remain unseen and untraceable, is the Western countries. It’s Germany, the United States, and others. The exhibition is careful about not including certain categories: for instance, there’s no mention of a certain country of settler colonialism.      

F. C.: You mentioned Hannah Arendt’s text “We Refugees” that speaks from a collective perspective. I’m wondering how it informed your thinking about the exhibition. Decolonizing Architecture Art Research’s (DAAR), work in the exhibition seems particularly relevant to the question since they are working with the idea of a “refugee heritage”.

V. K.: The classical understanding of refugees, especially in Europe, is basically that they are poor people. Some countries take them in, keeping the symbolically powerful ones such as artists, intellectuals, scientists and scholars. And then they discard the rest. They want to have the writers, the artists and the filmmakers embedded in the West, to produce representations of the refugee condition that emanated from there, a former ownership of the discourse. Whereas the masses - millions of people - seek refuge in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan… We’ve seen this repeatedly, in the Iraqi case, the Syrian case, the Afghani case, … A refugee is someone who is being called as such: you are a refugee and you have no rights, you have no voice, you have no representation and you’re helpless.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s work for DAAR undoes this notion. In the case of Palestine, we’re talking about eighty years of statelessness, from 1945 to 2025. In the cities, despite all that’s been taken down, destroyed, etc., things are built up again and again. The stamina in the face of impossibilities, the constant rebuilding that we witness, is quite remarkable.

Sandi and Alessandro are deeply involved in this reflection: when you build temporary architecture, what happens to the ways of building, the forms, the norms and habits? What do you do if there’s no electricity, if water runs out? What kind of architecture do you need to deal with these living conditions? DAAR’s project is about recognizing the agency of displacement.

There’s one image in DAAR’s installation that is uncanny. It shows a Venetian building from the 15^th century. It looks almost in ruins and is very similar to the other images of refugee camps in the installation. What is it that makes Venice a World Heritage site and not the West Bank? DAAR’s project implies a deep questioning of the United Nations and the nation-state project because heritage is linked to statehood.

N. R.: What I found interesting was that our discussion with DAAR was of course about space and architecture, but also about the definition of heritage. What is refugee heritage? Can rubble be considered heritage? What do we do when there’s only rubble left? We also talked about rubble and about the notion of soil with Oraib Toukan. She wrote about تربه (turbeh), the soil: when you are in displacement, this is what sticks to the sole of your shoes. At some point, during one of our conversations Sandi and Alessandro, from DAAR, suggested: “let’s make rubble World Heritage.”

F. C.: Many works in the exhibition suggest a form of resistance to destruction and remembrance. It’s impressive to see how resistance is expressed in the works. Sometimes, it’s about land and living things, such as in Suha Shoman’s film Bayyaratina about the history of her grandfather’s orange groves. Or, in Khalil Rabah’s work with olive trees, and in Oraib Toukan’s research on the soil that you just mentioned. In others cases, it’s about infrastructures, such as in Dima Srouji’s work about the unrealized modern urban plans for the city of Jaffa, or Barış Doğrusöz’s reappropriation of military architecture, and Jumana Manna’s street-like installation.

In the introductory text to the exhibition, you mention that many artists are also cultural workers, founders of alternative spaces for artists. This is not directly visible in the exhibition, but I feel it is important.

 

V. K.: Bringing together institutions and community builders in the exhibition wasn’t planned—it simply happened naturally. We’re drawn to people who contribute to the local ecology, especially in places where art goes beyond working alone in a studio. Art here means supporting the community, teaching, surviving together, and having endurance. It’s extremely difficult to sustain art institutions, initiatives, or collectives in this region.

Khalil Rabah co-founded Riwaq, a Ramallah-based organization, that does remarkable work for heritage preservation by documenting Palestinian villages and organizing the Riwaq Biennial. Suha Shoman founded Darat al Funun, which was initially a one-person institution in Amman and plays a major role in building knowledge from the region. Emily Jacir turned the old family house of the Jacir family into an Arts Center called Dar Jacir. yasmine eid-sabbagh has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation for many years, which is another pillar institution in the region. DAAR is a mobile education system; what they did while in Palestine is impressive.
Maybe we’re just drawn to those kinds of artists. They happen to be people with much more than their artistic practice. That’s very impressive.

F. C.: The exhibition takes place in Doha, at Mathaf, and it will travel to Belgium, to M HKA in Antwerp, and hopefully to other places. It shows a number of works by Palestinian artists living outside of Palestine and is transnational in many ways. What do you expect will happen when the exhibition travels? And from its reception by various audiences?

V. K.: That’s a great question. The exhibition needed to be shared and shown in different places. I served on the board of M HKA for several years. Lately, they’ve focused on art from the former Soviet Union's Eastern Republics, and they have a significant collection in that area. They’re also part of the L’Internationale network. We’ve worked with the team at M HKA for a long time. Bart de Baere, the museum’s director, joined us in Doha last November 2024 to talk about bringing the exhibition to Antwerp. We are simply glad it will be seen. Antwerp has a diverse audience, both Flemish and non-Flemish, and we’re hoping to connect with them.

We had hoped the exhibition would travel to another city in the MENA region or in Africa, but that hasn’t happened yet. The institutions there often don’t have as much funding as those in the West. It’s not a level playing field.

F. C.: I’m interested to hear about two works in the exhibition that are both research-based and that explore the history of transnational solidarities in colonial contexts: Emily Jacir’s installation Notes for a Cannon on Ireland and yasmine eid sabbagh’s video Metaphors on Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.

At the end of yasmine eid sabbagh’s video, which she made in collaboration with Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck, the following question is raised: “How can each of us, wherever we are, be in solidarity?”

V. K.: Emily’s installation was first shown ten years ago at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (IMMA). The installation had been stored in boxes for years and was reinstalled for we refuse_d. I’m happy that we took this leap of faith with Nadia to reinstall that work. It shows daunting parallels between two nations colonized by the British.

Emily talks about the impact of changing the time and imposing new temporalities as a means of colonial power and control. The British Empire imposed the Time Act of September 1916, defining Greenwich Mean Time as Ireland’s legal time. In Palestine, the situation is slightly different because it’s a multi-denominational space. When the cannon fires a shot, it’s the break of fast during Ramadan, إِفْطَار (iftar). The church bells give you another time. It not only organizes your religious life, but also how you use your time. The adhan from the minarets gives another time; it’s the lunar calendar. When the British came, the first thing they did was tear down the Ottoman clock tower in the center of Jerusalem. They erased the clock tower because it was not considered “authentic.” How can you have an “authentic” clock tower anyway? The Ottoman clock tower was two-faced; it showed the Islamic time and the Gregorian calendars. It recognized who the people were on the ground and whom it addressed. The British changed it to a new Greenwich Mean Time clock tower.

Changing the time is not just a numerical change. Changing time is a colonial imperative. It restructures the whole organization of a society. This happened in Ireland and in Palestine around the same time, from 1915 to 1918, though similar procedures. What Emily’s work allows for is an extraordinary cross-reading between the two contexts.

Something struck me as funny about the installation: a logo of the Irish football team Drogheda United, featuring a star and crescent. Emily told us that during the Great Famine in Ireland, the Ottoman Sultan sent a shipload of food to the Irish people. To thank him, people decided to change the logo of the football team, and the star and crescent have remained ever since. I’m not saying this to champion the Ottoman state, but there’s something to be said about the relationship between sending food and acts of solidarity. It’s similar to the charitable act of the zakat in the Muslim tradition, giving back a part of what you have to the community.

As for yasmine, she wanted to draw attention to what has happened in Africa in recent years between different African solidarity movements that used to be closely connected to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Today, the situation is very different, as some African governments, including Senegal, have moved away from this solidarity. Her work is a reflection on the implications of this shift.

N. R.: As much as many of the artists are cultural workers and founders of art spaces and institutions in the region, many are also researchers: Jumana Manna, Oraib Toukan, Nour Shantout, and of course Emily and yasmine. This is another common thread that emerged during the making of the exhibition.

It was important for us to be able to use this exhibition to support research projects. This was the case of yasmine’s project with her two collaborators Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck. It’s an ongoing research project and it made sense for us to support initiatives that could continue after the exhibition and extend beyond the walls of the Museum. Her video shown in we refuse_d is one result of a broader research project.

Having these two works that branch out to other regions and networks of solidarity was important to us also because we did not want to do an exhibition about Palestine. we refuse_d is an exhibition that responds to the urgency and immediacy of the current situation, but it’s not an exhibition about Palestine nor an exhibition for Palestinian artists; it goes beyond that. Emily’s work connecting Palestine with Ireland, and yasmine’s with Senegal and Guinea Bissau, map transnational solidarities, shared struggles and common histories of trauma.

F. C.: This makes me think of something you said, Nadia, when you first told me about we refuse_d: that there’s no “pornography of violence” in this exhibition. It’s a strong statement to avoid the violence of images in the current moment and instead propose a much-needed “counter-visuality.” I was impressed, for instance, by Taysir Batniji’s series of abstract works called Homeless Colors. It’s both simple and profound and carries such emotional resonance in connection with exile, despair and resistance.

N. R.: In the first months of the war on Gaza, several artists who had already faced tremendous and traumatic loss throughout their lives probably reached the worst point of this long history. Some of them were not capable of making art anymore. There was a kind of paralysis. Some artists also told us that they couldn’t look at images anymore. That was the case for Taysir: he wasn’t able to make art for a while and couldn’t “decruel” images any longer. That’s why he started this series of monochromes with very soothing and gentle colors, to appease and try to heal the eyes.

It was also the case of Majd Abdel Hamid who could no longer look at images of the war. He practices embroidery, but he also began searching for small, simple pleasures, as he told us, such as eating an orange. He would then photograph the orange and the peel, as a kind of routine artistic gesture. His artistic work has helped him in the recent years as a means of survival and care. 

V. K.: What is art anyway if it just reduces itself to the representation of what we already see, what we already know? In Taysir’s case, some of the work emerges directly from the disaster itself: the found material, the pen, becomes the tool you paint with until it runs out. It follows a very Felix González-Torres like procedure. Oraib Toukan’s photographs operate similarly; her photographs offer a different way of thinking about soil and place.

There’s something numbing about images of disasters that we have been familiar with since the 1950s. Artworks are coming out of Gaza that refer to it, produced by inhabitants who are desperately trying to get out. People work with what they have on hand, notebooks and simple ballpoint pens. That’s another form of survival: doing art in a context of extreme scarcity, without electricity or water, relying on what you can gather.

Basically, we refuse_d doesn’t want to assume any moral authority by showing viewers images that circulate in the media. It refuses that kind of position. That would be a United Nations-style exhibition, which wouldn’t produce another reality, but would lock you into the image itself and into victimization. Good artwork is always more than that.

F. C.: The artists exhibited belong to different generations: Samia Halaby was born in 1936 and Nour Shantout, the youngest artist in the show, in 1991. All artists are alive, except for Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, who died in 2020. What does this generation span bring to the exhibition? Was it intentional? And why did you include Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara?

N. R.: Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara was the last artist we added to the exhibition. There’s a very straightforward reason: this exhibition marks the 15th anniversary of Mathaf and the museum wanted to include fifteen artists. The presence of his works in the exhibition is nevertheless significant as a historicizing figure. It was important to have his works as a reminder of a particular time and location amongst all these more conceptual artists. Zarara is also someone who was deeply engaged politically.

 

V. K.: I remember that in the 1980s, some publications discussed the Palestinian boycott of Western artists’ materials, such as paints that came in tubes and had to be obtained through the occupier. Then, there was a turning point when artists began using different materials they could find and discovering new ways to create their work.

Zarara taught himself and began making art around 1982, during the siege of Beirut, responding to his own material situation and the environment around him. He used white glue, hay, soda cans, and other found materials to create these high-relief sculptures. They’re beautiful, but their materials and how they were made also reflect the difficult conditions he faced.

These works bring a new energy and form to the exhibition. They take visitors beyond the usual experience of contemporary art and encourage them to see things from a different angle. The goal isn’t to make you uncomfortable but to shift your perspective. Similarly, Walid and Pierre’s installation helps you see other things in a new light.

F. C.: Could you talk about how you envisioned the installation of the works in the museum, and how the visitors would encounter them in space and time?

V. K.: What was clear to us early on was that we would start with Samia’s works and end with Jumana’s. DAAR’s installation is in the entrance hall of the museum. It has its own space, it’s what greets you first. As we followed Walid’s project as it evolved, we knew it had to be interstitial: it had to break and open the exhibition at the same time, cutting through. That was quite critical. These works were already in place, and for the rest, we played around.

Sometimes things fall into place without being planned. The way yasmine and Emily’s, or Suha and Khalil’s contributions work together wasn’t completely conscious. Abdul Hay’s works and Oraib’s also have a great tension between them. Those are the high points of interaction between the works, but then there are also works that don’t necessarily interact directly yet share the same space, such as Dima’s and Taysir's. These combinations are not conceptual; the works simply flow into each other.

N. R.: We also tried to create moments of tension and contrast for instance between Barış’ very refined light sculptures, which are hung on bright white walls, and Nour’s handmade embroideries, which are displayed in a dark room. We wanted the visitor to remain in tension throughout the trajectory.

F. C.: In Walid Raad’s installation, there’s a sentence written on the wall that’s almost made invisible: “Leadership told him they wanted to avoid ‘picking a side.’”…

V. K.: The sentence obviously means that institutions are supposed to take sides. And they do. They take the side of silence, of the oppressor, of power; they take the side of a narrative that complies with the state narrative. 99,9 percent of European, U.S., Canadian, and Australian institutions have taken a side.

An institution has to take a side when making decisions and presenting projects that serve society, projects that help us make better judgments on certain issues, and bring urgency into the museum space. Their role is public.

They must take a side, and that doesn’t mean belonging to a camp, but acknowledging responsibility. That responsibility is currently not being fulfilled at all. European and U.S. institutions are playing the three monkeys. Neutrality is a fiction, behind which you can hide. It’s like calling the colonization of Palestine a “conflict,” it’s exactly that kind of language that evades taking responsibility.

This is a common and repeated statement from many institutions: “let them sort it out between themselves,” or whatever. The superimposed vinyl sentence on Walid’s wall is repeated ad nauseam and becomes blurry and almost illegible; it becomes completely devoid of meaning. It’s a lie told too many times.