Curated by RIDIKKULUZ, with a text by Edwin Nasr, the group exhibition convenes artists engaging lineage, decolonial archives and futurity across two New York spaces
Alex Khalifa, Bust, 2023-2026. Alabaster. Photography: Studio Kukla
‘of us [minna | منا]’ is currently on view at PARTICIPANT INC and SALMA in New York. Co-organised by both institutions and curated by Palestinian–Egyptian–Jordanian artist RIDIKKULUZ, the exhibition takes its title from the Arabic word minna, meaning “of us” or “from us”. The term signals intimacy and collectivity, describing a condition of being claimed by a community and understood within an atmosphere of queer belonging.
The exhibition opened on 1 February 2026 and brings together works by Xaytun Ennasr, Falyakon, Anka Kassabji, Alex Khalifa, André and Evan Lenox-Samour, Elias Rischmawi, Fares Rizk a.k.a. Sultana, and Basyma Saad. Across painting, sculpture, sound, film and installation, the artists engage transmission, craft and continuity, positioning practice as both inheritance and offering.
A companion essay by writer and cultural worker Edwin Nasr frames the exhibition as beginning from refusal: a refusal of what he describes as the “suffocating, airless space between the artisanal lie and the imperial lie”. Rather than seeking recognition through liberal frameworks of legibility and mourning, the exhibition asserts presence on its own terms. For Nasr, minna gathers gestures that operate as protective barriers against capture and rescue.
Lineage, land and material insistence
Several works foreground land, memory and embodiment as sites of resistance. Xaytun Ennasr presents paintings that situate Palestinian liberation and trans life within earthly registers, reworking the final words of Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazy to insist on life on land rather than transcendence. Falyakon’s immersive soundscape interweaves Palestinian field recordings and electronic composition, transforming archival memory into intimate sonic continuity.
Alex Khalifa’s alabaster Bust, carved between 2023 and 2026, draws on Egyptian funerary portraiture to consider the face, time, and the encryption of memory in stone. André and Evan Lenox-Samour reanimate Bethlehem’s mother-of-pearl carving traditions, embedding stars drawn from Christian, Palestinian and queer histories into abstract commemorative forms. Through acts of craft and material labour, the artists resist dispossession while sustaining cultural techniques shaped by pilgrimage, extraction and diaspora.
Elias Rischmawi’s ongoing archival project assembles photographs, recipes and recordings from family histories, asserting love and care as forms of resistance to erasure. Fares Rizk’s painted self-portraits of drag alter ego Sultana situate glamour and performance within histories of queer nightlife and Middle Eastern diaspora, positioning self-fashioning as a site of healing.
Gathering as fragile futurity
Basyma Saad’s film Congress of Idling Persons situates scenes of gathering within overlapping global crises, from uprisings to pandemic and the Beirut port explosion. Through fiction, analysis and dark humour, the work treats collective assembly as both precarious and necessary.
Nasr describes minna as refusing both homonationalist assimilation and romanticised victimhood, engaging queerness as an everyday practice of survival under conditions of dispossession. Rather than proposing a fixed “we,” the exhibition remains attentive to movement, scattering and return.
‘of us [minna | منا]’, curated by RIDIKKULUZ with a text by Edwin Nasr, opened at PARTICIPANT INC and SALMA, New York, on 1 February 2026 and remains on view until 15 March 2026. For more information, please visit PARTICIPANT INC.
