Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha is currently home to we refuse_d, a collective exhibition conceived as part of Mathaf’s 15th anniversary season. It brings together fifteen international artists from across the Arab world and its diasporas, representing a range of generations and media. Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasıf Kortun, the exhibition will run through 9 February 2026.
The show takes its title from two historical sources: We Refugees (1943), Hannah Arendt’s essay, and the spirit of the eighteenth-century Parisian Salon des Refusés, a landmark exhibition that gave visibility to artists rejected by official institutions. This dual reference foregrounds the exhibition’s core interest in asking what it means to persist, resist, and create in the face of silencing, censorship, displacement, and social constraint.
Rather than framing refusal as simply negative withdrawal, the curators explore refusal as an act of creative and political agency: a stance that asserts presence, solidarity, collective care, and endurance. Most of the displayed artworks are new commissions developed through ongoing dialogue between the artists and curators, emphasising art as an essential presence rather than a peripheral or passive witness.
The exhibition is divided into seven galleries and two additional spaces, bringing together works by creatives from four generations. The art pieces span a diversity of forms: installations, video, painting, archival engagements, and conceptual interventions, addressing personal and collective histories, memory, heritage, and acts of resistance.
Among the participants is Palestinian artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna, who examines the intersections of history, politics, and material culture. Also featured are Samia Halaby, a pioneering figure of abstract art in the Arab world and internationally, alongside multidisciplinary artist Taysir Batniji, whose work addresses displacement, impermanence, fragility, memory, and the politics of visibility.
The exhibition further includes works by Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher Dima Srouji, whose practice excavates the ground as a site of suppressed histories and potential liberation, as well as DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), established by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. Operating at the intersection of architecture, art, pedagogy, and politics, DAAR’s work has, for over 20 years, reimagined spaces shaped by exile, displacement, and resistance.
Additional participants are:
- Turkish artist and filmmaker Barış Doğrusöz;
- Syrian-Palestinian artist, researcher, and educator Nour Shantout;
- Palestinian artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir;
- Filmmaker, mixed-media artist, and researcher Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, who has collaborated with Senegalese researcher, writer, and artist Tabara Korka Ndiaye and teacher, journalist, and photographer Ndeye Debo Seck;
- Palestinian artist and curator Khalil Rabah;
- Artist and scholar Oraib Toukan;
- Palestinian artists Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara and Majd Abdelhamid;
- Jordanian artist Suha Shoman;
- Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Walid Raad, in collaboration with typographer and graphic designer Pierre Huyghebaert.
To get more information about we refuse_d, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in attending Self‑portrait with a cat I don’t have, Bady Dalloul’s solo exhibition.
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