Shaunak Mahbubani: When outsiders tell a story, there's often a flattening of complexity
Curator speaks about exhibition making, subverting hegemonies and revisiting pasts.
The moment you hear the magnetic dance-pop song playing from one of the rooms in Prishtina’s gray Grand Hotel, it’s impossible not to want to peek inside. The song “Intifada on the Dance Floor” by Palestinian artist Bashar Murad blends house beats with Arabic instrumentation and like most of his work deals with the violence of daily life as a Palestinian, the Israeli occupation and everyday joys for Palestinian people.
Murad’s song, along with the works of 19 other artists from the Balkans and beyond, is featured in the exhibition “Wrapped in the Shadow of Freedom,” curated by Shaunak Mahbubani, a nomadic curator and writer based between Berlin, Germany and Mumbai, India.
For this exhibition, Mahbubani has worked with assistant-curator Anyla Kabashi, an art historian and writer based in Kosovo. This large-scale exhibition, the first of its kind, is organized by the Kosovo-based NGO Sekhmet Institute and explores the contemporary complexities of queerness, “seeking to reorient priorities toward those in the shadows and margins of the non-normative,” as the exhibition’s curatorial note states.
The exhibition space, usually defined by its stark concrete, has been transformed into an inviting space centered around a seating area. This space appears designed to foster friendship, surrounded by works that, while focusing on queerness, engage with questions of legacy, tradition, colonialism, queerphobic violence, illness and erasure, just to name a few.
There, one is enveloped by two poems hanging on fabric, facing each other — one by poet Ledia Dushi from Albania, which inspired the title of exhibition, titled: “Ndryshue” [Change], written in 1999 and the other, “Bahem” [Become] by poet Uresa Ahmeti from Kosovo, written in 2024. Both, face to face, as if looking after one another, symbolize remembering, recognizing and honoring legacies of queer ancestors and adjacent movements, and speak of the intergenerational connection that the exhibition highlights.
Across different rooms, which flow seamlessly without doors, the works of the participating artists converge to tell important stories. These include 19th-century archival photographs from Albania depicting Albanian men in intimate settings in homosocial poses, the sex-worker-led zine “Kraximo” from Greece, digital prints that blend traditional Bulgarian symbols with contemporary queer perspectives and a manifesto on Roma queer and non-binary rights in Slovakia. According to Mahbubani, this exhibition is arranged to “avoid the sanitized placement of European exhibition making,” and it challenges any sort of distance between the viewer and the artwork, opening itself up to multiple senses and interpretations.
Together, these works tell a larger story with questions of freedom as its nucleus. They bring to the fore “smaller moments of joy, the kinships that are formed, the ways in which we find resilience that may not be that visible,” as Mahbubani puts it.
While the exhibition remains on view until September 29, 2024, K2.0 spoke with curator Mahbubani about exhibition making, subverting hegemonies and revisiting pasts.
K2.0: When you received the invitation to curate this exhibition in Prishtina, what were your first thoughts?
Shaunak Mahbubani: What was, and has been, really exciting for me was to build a conversation, to build this dialogue outside of Western European frameworks. That is something I try to do in all of my work, even though I am based in Berlin; because of the ways that resources and opportunities circulate within the art world at large, I always try to find ways to subvert the hegemony of Western Europe and its centrality using resources, using the mobility that is present there, but to have conversations on our own terms. There was a desire to push our stories on our own terms, queer stories on our own terms.
When you say to tell our stories “on our terms” what do you mean?
For so many years, queer stories have been told by non-queer people because it was either too dangerous, we could not get the resources to do it, or we were deemed to not have the necessary skills to be able to do it.
And what happens, and this goes beyond the question of queerness, what happens when somebody else, an outsider tells a story is that often there’s a flattening of complexity.
There’s a certain part of that story that gets highlighted, and very often it’s the more traumatic parts. But what gets missed out is often smaller moments of joy, the kinships that are formed, the ways in which we find resilience that may not be that visible.
I work a lot with this theory by Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter. She proposes the idea of autopoiesis, where she says that we must reclaim the power to narrate our own stories as a way to institute ourselves as full and complex human beings. I think this ability to be seen as full and complex is very important and something that we’ve been denied for many centuries.
Your exhibition gathers 20 artists across different disciplines, mediums, formats, countries. How was the process of putting this exhibition together?
What has always gotten me excited about exhibition making, about curating, is the possibility to have this kind of polyphonic conversation. I think all of my group exhibitions strive for that kind of space making, which enables an encounter with multiple formats, but also that kind of expands the core idea of what we think about. So there’s not one definition of queer in this space. Everybody’s coming in with their own perspective from their own locations. Again, thinking auto poetically, everybody thinks through their own stories and their own communities.
The process also was as varied as the works that you see. We followed three primary threads of finding artists.
One was doing on-ground research here in Prishtina. We [the curatorial and exhibition team] had an intensive research period at the beginning of the project, meeting a lot or almost all of the queer artists and organizations within the city as well as those in the diaspora from the region. It was very important for me to respond to what is happening in this context. I don’t believe in a process where I just get some ideas from outside and put them together.
There is a constant gaze towards Europe and this idea of Europe as a space where one accesses freedom. But for those of us who live there, we have realized that is not the case.
We also wanted to find a way to bring in artists from the Balkan region that we may not have been connected with. We used a hybrid approach. A lot of the artists were invited, but we also put out an open call inviting artists that may not be in our networks. For example, Nanda Agić’s [visual artist and printmaker based in Sarajevo] work, these beautiful prints that have traveled from Bosnia for the show, came in through that open call.
The third thread was inviting international artists that expand some of these conversations but also provoke certain questions within the local or regional frameworks. For me, it was really important to invite artists of color. I realized that there is a constant gaze towards Europe and this idea of Europe as a free space, a space where one accesses freedom. But for those of us who live there, we have realized that is not the case. So we invited artists of color who will then have conversations with the works that were being developed or discussed.
For example, it was really beautiful to have this conversation with Robert Gabris, who is originally from Slovakia, who speaks through this experience of Roma discrimination and this multi-marginalization with Roma identities and queerness.
Visibility is often heralded as one the most important things for queer rights. However, you speak of a clash between visibility and safety.
Ever since the media age has existed, visibility has been a sort of currency. It’s the making of celebrity culture in a lot of ways. And this filters down into all of our lives even more strongly through the advent of social media.
This idea of the micro-celebrity or the influencer is based on how visible one is, on how many likes or what engagement one is getting. It often seems in today’s world that the only way to make it anywhere is through this constant mining of the visibility algorithm. But this doesn’t exist only in the media. Another space where this also exists and that is not spoken about as much is within the legal system. The legal system demands for us to make ourselves visible to be able to get any kind of legal rights. If you’re not a subject that is legible in the eyes of the law, you cannot be bestowed any rights.
That’s why, because queer people were never recognized legally, we were never given any rights before all of the struggles that have happened in the last decades. But what often happens is that there’s again a flattening of identities when we are made to fit into these legal framings, and in both of these cases I think what goes unnoticed is a sort of violence that comes with it.
I have met trans people in Kosovo who have been fighting to change their legal markers and within that fight have had to make themselves visible both in the eyes of the law but also within a larger public sphere. They have received multiple threats on their life. I know that in the case of Lend [Mustafa, trans man and prominent LGBTQ+ rights activist based in Kosovo] there was an attempt to run over him with a car. It’s only one of the examples of the violence faced when one is making oneself visible, especially when within gender dissidence, but also in public shows of affection.
We even see that happening in Astrit’s [Ismaili, multidisciplinary artist, performer and choreographer born in Kosovo, based in Amsterdam] work here. When the character of Siki — semi-autobiographically based on Astrit’s childhood, transforms, comes into her own identity and steps out onto the street, she’s attacked by this homophobic, very, very macho gang.
This is often slurs and people pointing at you and laughing, but also can be more dangerous. It’s something that is kind of within our lives, within all of our lives as queer people, still happening today across the world, even in Berlin. So this other side of visibility often gets missed out within people saying “oh I want to give you a platform” or “I want to tell your story and then this is good for the whole community.” But what about that person who’s actually then in the limelight and at greater risk of facing this kind of violence and often facing it alone in the end.
In your curatorial note, you say “amongst fair-skinned people who seem more brown than white, the complex histories of war and dense kinship networks make my experience in Pristina feel closer to New Delhi than Berlin.”. What does that mean?
I think it’s definitely a sentence that takes a leap and it’s something that I was unsure how it would be received here; but it’s something that I felt from the very first time I came. There’s a certain kind of entitlement, there’s a certain kind of condescension and exclusionary attitude that I think sits within the core of whiteness. Traveling here within the European continent, I didn’t know whether I would encounter that. But I was surprised and extremely happy to find that I did not.
There was a feeling of being welcomed, enthusiasm, openness of interaction that made me think about this a lot more deeply. It’s really made me question this idea of the tight coupling between whiteness and skin color, and how it’s not as apparent as it may seem.
Within one of our early conversations, someone was telling me about their mother’s relationship with their identity and I won’t go into the whole story, but I can say it from my perspective, it was an “aha” moment when I realized that I’ve had this exact same conversation with my mother.
In the early days of thinking about my gender identity and coming into a more femme presentation, I was visiting my parents’ home and I had earrings and nail paint, something I was still experimenting with at that time. We were going to go to an aunt’s house and she said “whatever you want to do at home is okay, but when we’re going to meet them don’t do all of these things.” It was quite a moment of revelation to realize that this system of family kinship, where we find so much support, also results in a certain kind of restriction, and it also exists in a very similar way here.
I think that kind of affinity towards family, towards social structure, the desire to make negotiations with identity in order to hold on to family structure is something very similar that I find with India and other places that I’ve lived and worked, like Mexico City and with Lagos. So in that sense, within these two examples, these two spaces make me feel like where I’m standing here is much more connected to realities in India, and it also reinforced this need to show artists of color and to kind of urge a reorientation of solidarities towards the Global South.
What about the binary of New Delhi and Berlin?
The usage of New Delhi and Berlin is just very much within the spaces that I know well. But it’s not about creating a simple binary, because within each space also there are different levels of privilege. Even within India, for example, privilege is very much embedded along caste lines. Those who are on top of the caste hierarchy have much more access to academic, social, art spaces. I sit within the middle of the caste pyramid, and I can see positionality on both sides. I think it gives me a certain kind of perspective to understand that this binary is much more complex. Somebody who is privileged in the Global South could actually have more access than somebody who is at the bottom of the power structure even within Western Europe.
You also speak about disrupting the hegemony of U.S.-Euro discourse. What does that hegemony look like in this context?
One of the examples of this kind of Euro-U.S. discourse is this insistence on coming out. It was a huge kind of demand within early queer movements in the U.S.. There’s even a National Coming Out Day [October 11]. But for us who exist within non-western dense kinship networks and who don’t have the same kind of social security, who don’t have state support in the same way, it cannot be seen in the same way.
Isolation is such a big phenomenon within queer communities in Europe, and it's because there's no one to hold you when you're falling.
We cannot simply look to imitate ways in which those networks have worked, ways in which those gestures have worked. I think there is the possibility, for example, to do a longer, softer process of coming out. One that takes a bit more labor, that demands a bit more negotiation of the identity, demands a lot more difficult conversations with our parents, with our families. One that then allows us to hold on to this familial or broader kinship system that is so important. That also means a lower kind of prevalence of alienation.
Isolation is such a big phenomenon within queer communities in Europe, and it’s because there’s no one to hold you when you’re falling. As much as we have the importance of chosen families, I think I have to acknowledge that I’ve been very lucky to find the chosen family that I have right now. I would not have found it if I was not in Berlin. They’re from all over the world — — none of them are Germans, but they’ve all come together in Berlin because there’s a certain kind of possibility to meet there.
But I think there’s also sometimes the need to rely on our natal families, for some spaces where they know us the best, and I think to not fall into the trap of alienation, of isolation, of visibility currencies. The way that Instagram media, the way that Instagram influencers exist in the U.S. and is one of the main spaces for queer trans people to get any kind of money is within this kind of performance realm. I think that we have the possibility to disrupt and poke holes in those conventions.
I see revisiting the past and engaging with it in a new way as central to your work. How do you engage with legacy?
Within queer movements we often have a sense of amnesia, everything moves so fast and everybody wants to be the one who did it first. We have a sense of losing respect for those who did it even in invisible ways, who fought before there were safe archives or did not want to put themselves into visible archives. When we acknowledge them, honor their achievements and stand on their shoulders, we’re able to move so much further. In doing so, there’s also this really important feeling that says we’re not alone. I think it’s also very important to look to adjacent movements that have fought for marginalized identities to be taken seriously, to have dignity.
In seeing the way that I found Ledia Dushi’s poem really early on in the research process and just deeply feeling the ways that it resonates with the struggles that we pursue today. I felt it was not enough or it didn’t feel meaningful to simply use her poem as a title but to engage more with her work in a way that could have a certain kind of afterlife.
So by commissioning Uresa [Ahmeti], somebody who can be seen in the lineage of poets that Ledia comes from, there is this desire to see how creative processes, how exhibition making processes can generate connections, can generate reciprocities, can also in some way make an offering of creative love to those who have been fighting before us. Zooming out allows us to see that continuing the work will have an impact in the larger timeline.
Also, I come from a history of displacement. My family was forced to move from the region that is now in Pakistan into India when the subcontinent was partitioned. I don’t know many of my own ancestors. So within exhibition making, in acknowledging these presences, I think there’s also an ode to relating to ancestors that I don’t have a connection with. Queer people have also had very low life expectancies across the ages. This process of recognizing ancestors also acknowledges that we can have really full lives, and to hold on to that is something that then allows us to move forward as well.
You don’t merely acknowledge what has been done before. In this exhibition, there are works that reclaim tradition, re-read it, even alter it. Is there a tension in doing so?
There’s always a pushback to change, and those on the forefront of it do face certain kinds of violence. That is the contradiction of visibility. The exhibition hopes to produce this idea of tradition as a realm that is not static. It’s always subject to change.
What we know today is what has remained in the archives, in our history books, in public memory.
But it has always been instigated and transformed by those who were living it. I think that art has that powerful possibility to provoke these transformations. When we see Kris’s [Kristiyan Chalakov, a Bulgarian visual artist] work of queering Bulgarian traditions, there’s the question that arises: why can’t gender non-conformity be a national tradition?
In your curatorial note, you also mention queer ancestors that “have been made invisible by colonial epistemological violence.” Can you elaborate on that?
So there’s another proposition that I’ve been developing that thinks about ways of healing wounded archives, as I like to call them. We’re often strongly made aware of loss to life or property or land — property as a very extended space — that comes as part of colonialism.
But there’s also a very important epistemological violence that is at the core of colonialism that makes us forget who we are and where we come from, in order for colonial narratives to be thrusted upon us and for assimilation to be made easier, for resistance to be subdued.
Piro’s [Rexhepi, researcher focused on the intersections of religion, sexuality and coloniality] work makes visible the existence of multiple kinds of gender and sexual identities in the Balkans in the 18th century and before. There’s this one picture where we see a European soldier, an Italian soldier, penalizing a gender non-conforming person as actually symbolic of the import of homophobia.
So this kind of hypocrisy of empire continues to exist up to today, and this is something also that I hope people take away from the exhibition.
In India, in South Asia for example, when the British came in, they classified trans people under a criminal tribes act.
Va-bene [Elikem Fiatsi] from Ghana talks about the way that Christianity still enforces a certain kind of politics of queerphobia that is leading to anti-queer, really dangerous anti-queer laws coming up all over Africa. There’s one that she is strongly fighting against in Ghana, but we know that these laws exist in Nigeria and Uganda.
The U.S. ambassador will stand in the front of pride here in Prishtina, but at the same time U.S. lobbies will support anti-queer laws in Ghana, as well as pass anti-trans laws in their own country. This kind of hypocrisy of Empire continues to exist up to today, and this is something also that I hope people take away from the exhibition.
You chose to engage with Palestine at a time when there is an ongoing conversation about censorship of Palestine-related art or Palestinian artists. How did you make that decision?
It was really never a question. There are multiple motivations that led into it. One is acknowledging Kosovo’s past as an occupied state and extending solidarity and extending a recognition also of that past to other regions that are currently occupied. We have artists both from Palestine as well as Kashmir that elongate this idea that none of us are free until all of us are free. The issue of Palestine has come under a lot of censorship. Especially in Germany, where I live, it’s very dangerous to speak openly about Palestine.
There's a multi-marginalization of queer people within regions under militarization and occupation.
But I think that it’s a question that sits at the core of challenging European and U.S. hegemonies. An artist friend who is from Kashmir actually said that the liberation of Palestine will require us to rethink all our social structures. And given its position, given its support from empire, given the impunity that we see for Israel, it really becomes a question that we need to engage with in any quest, in any exploration of freedom. There’s a multi-marginalization of queer people within regions under militarization and occupation. I think to foreground that, also within larger conversations, is extremely important.
Also, choosing this specific song [in the exhibition] has a significance. Bashar Murad says “Intifada on the dance floor,” urging us to not separate our queer spaces from these politics, to imbue these politics when we’re having fun, when we’re making friends, when we’re making love. The definition of queerness, as I as I see it personally, is not in fighting for the right to get married and have inheritance but fighting for the right for all of us to be free.
In this exhibition, you also engage with illness, disability and also HIV, an issue that is often thought of as something of the past. What was the thought process behind it?
One of the motivations in bringing the selection of artists together is to also think about who exists at the margins and shadows of queerness itself. I think those of us who are chronically ill or disabled, and I say those of us, because I live with HIV myself, and something that’s not very always easy to speak about. I think that these conversations often get left out of queer platforms because they’re not fun, they’re not shiny, they are not exciting in the same way.
When I heard Liki [Arlinda Morina]’s story [who was hospitalized for plasma cell leukemia] really early on in the research phase, I knew that this was a conversation that I wanted to bring into the exhibition. Because it not only talks about illness, but also it talks about its relation to the body, to isolation, to rediscovering or redefining one’s identity.
I think recognizing that we need to make more spaces for disabled, for immunocompromised, chronically ill people within our movements, within our spaces, within our dance floors, is something that organizers need to take more seriously.
Lastly, when you say, in your curatorial note, that how you place the works in the space seeks to avoid the sanitized placement of European exhibition making, what do you mean?
I think the European discourse often seeks to treat the artwork, and especially this also comes from market forces, as this sacred object that requires a lot of space around it to be seen by itself, to be seen only in its own meaning, to not be disturbed by other factors around it.
It almost makes it an altarpiece as a way to prescribe value upon it. What I was interested in doing here is to create conversations in proximity of work, in creating intimacies between certain kinds of work that then also allow multiple meanings to emerge.
It’s often in this hustle-bustle, it’s often in the disordered crowd — whether it’s a protest or whether it’s a dance floor or even the bazaar — there is a certain kind of energy created in the intimate chaos. That’s something that I’ve tried to bring into the space here — to see works in intimacy, to place multiple works in spaces, to try to use these exact spaces in ways that they were not used in the past, to suggest that we can respect the viewer to be able to make a distinction between works, while also seeing them together and then creating the possibility of so many more meanings to emerge.
This article has been edited for length and clarity. The conversation was conducted in English.
Feature Image: Majlinda Hoxha / K2.0
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