At M HKA, Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun reframe refusal beyond negation, tracing its movements across displacement, institutional critique, and artistic agency.
11 April 2026
Marking fifteen years of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, ‘we refuse_d’ arrives at M HKA as both a travelling exhibition and a shifting proposition. ART AFRICA spoke to curators Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun about how the project resists closure, refusing to stabilise its central premise into a single thesis. Instead, it gathers a constellation of practices that move between survival and dignity, presence and erasure, insisting on refusal as a lived and contested condition rather than a declarative stance. Drawing on intertwined genealogies, from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on displacement to the historical charge of the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition foregrounds refusal as a negotiation with visibility, legitimacy, and voice. Here, refusal is not only an act of resistance, but a strategy of redefinition, one that unfolds across generations and geographies while remaining attentive to the urgencies shaping artistic production in and beyond the Arab world.
In Antwerp, the exhibition takes on new inflexions. Displaced from its originating context in Doha, it enters a European institutional frame that risks flattening its complexities even as it opens other interpretive possibilities. What emerges is an exhibition that tests the limits of the museum itself, asking what it means to host refusal, and whether such gestures can retain their critical edge within the very structures they seek to unsettle.
Khalil Rabah, Evidence, 2025. Photo Christine Clinckx. Ⓒ M HKA.
Suzette Bell- Roberts: ‘we refuse_d’ borrows its title from Hannah Arendt’s essay We Refugees, while also echoing the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés. How did these historical references inform your curatorial thinking, and what forms of refusal feel most urgent within contemporary artistic practices from the Arab world today?
Vasif Kortun & Nadia Radwan: The title brought together two very different but equally charged genealogies. With Hannah Arendt, what resonates is not only the condition of displacement but also the way naming oneself becomes a political act: refusing imposed identities while navigating systems that deny agency. The Salon des Refusés, on the other hand, reminds us that refusal has long been entangled with questions of visibility and legitimacy: what is excluded, and who decides. These references were less about citation and more about orientation. They allowed us to think of refusal not as a singular act of opposition, but as something that moves between survival, dignity, and redefinition. In the present, particularly in artistic practices from the Arab world, refusal operates under conditions where speech itself is constrained. What feels most urgent is not only refusing dominant narratives but also refusing erasure, insisting on presence, memory, and the right to complexity in contexts that demand simplification.
Barış Doğrusöz, Interstices, A dizzying array of combinations, 2025. Photo Christine Clinckx. Ⓒ M HKA.
Rather than presenting refusal as a singular gesture, the exhibition unfolds through multiple positions, poetic, political, and material. How did you approach curating refusal as a spectrum of practices rather than a unified thesis?
From the outset, it was important not to stabilise refusal into a fixed category. If anything, we were interested in its agency. Rather than building a thesis and selecting works to illustrate it, we followed the artists’ own approaches. Curating in this way meant accepting a certain openness. The exhibition doesn’t resolve what refusal is, but it allows different modalities to coexist.
Nour Shantout, Money Hat (2021-2022), and We Call It Unwaged Work (2021-2022), from the series ’Searching for the New Dress’. Photo Christine Clinckx. Ⓒ M HKA.
The exhibition coincides with Mathaf’s fifteenth anniversary. To what extent does ‘we refuse_d’ function as a reflection on the museum’s own institutional history, its possibilities, but also its limitations?
The coincidence with Mathaf’s anniversary introduced a reflection, but not in a commemorative sense. It became an opportunity to think about what it means for an institution to sustain criticality over time. Mathaf has played a significant role in shaping narratives around modern and contemporary art from the region, yet like any institution, it is also shaped by its own structures and constraints. The exhibition engages with this ambivalence: it acknowledges the museum as a site of possibility, while also testing its limits.
DAAR, Refugee Heritage Project, 2025. Photo Christine Clinckx. Ⓒ M HKA.
Several of the works were newly commissioned. How did the process of commissioning shape the conversation around refusal, particularly in relation to the artists’ own contexts of censorship, displacement, or political constraint?
The commissioning process was central because it allowed the exhibition to remain responsive to urgency and immediacy. Many of the artists were working within the ongoing conditions of censorship, displacement, or loss that directly informed their contributions. What emerged was not a uniform response to refusal but a set of subtle, situated positions. Commissioning became less about producing new works than about creating a dialogue and a space where these different approaches could be articulated without being flattened.
The exhibition brings together artists across generations and geographies. Were there particular tensions or unexpected affinities between the works that ultimately reshaped your curatorial framework?
Bringing together artists across generations introduced a sense of continuity, showing how different practices and experimental approaches are grounded in common histories. There were unexpected resonances and affinities that were not planned, but they became visible through the exhibition itself.
Samia Halaby, Position Slide, 1980. Foto Christine Clinckx M HKA.
Refusal is often framed as a negative gesture, a rejection. In the context of this exhibition, how does refusal operate as a generative force, one capable of producing alternative imaginaries, solidarities, or forms of care?
Refusal functions as both a starting point and a possibility for recognising the artists’ agency. This might take the form of more subtle gestures of care and solidarity that operate outside dominant structures. In that sense, refusal becomes an act of resistance.
Walid Raad (met – with Pierre Huyghebaert) – I thought I’d escape my fate (again), 2026. Foto Christine Clinckx – M HKA.
With ‘we refuse_d’ travelling from Mathaf in Doha to M HKA in Antwerp, how does the shift in institutional and geopolitical context alter the exhibition’s reading, particularly for European audiences?
The shift from Mathaf to M HKA inevitably alters the conditions of the exhibition’s reception. In Doha, the works resonated within a regional proximity; in Antwerp, they enter a different set of expectations and interpretive frameworks. For European audiences, the exhibition may be read more explicitly through geopolitical lenses, which can risk reducing the works to their contexts. At the same time, this displacement can open other readings, highlighting formal strategies or conceptual concerns that extend beyond geography. The exhibition changes and is reactivated by each context.
Taysir Batniji – Untitled, 1997. Foto Christine Clinckx – M HKA
At a moment when museums increasingly position themselves as spaces of political engagement, what does it mean for an institution to host an exhibition centred on refusal? Can refusal itself be institutionalised without losing its critical edge?
Institutions adopt wordings of political engagement while carefully maintaining their comfort zones and avoiding positions that might alienate funders, partners, or state frameworks. In this context, political engagement is often tolerated only when it is already historicised, aestheticised, or remains discursive. To host an exhibition titled ‘we refuse_d’ requires a certain degree of courage, especially in the European context, a courage largely absent in most museums today. For that, one has to accept a certain degree of instability, friction and debate, which is sadly disappearing and is one of the most vital roles the museum space can play.
This exhibition is on view at M HKA Amsterdam until 7 June 2026.
