This exhibition uncovers the queer history of Islamic art

“Dildos were so, so abundant in the archives,” Noor Bhangu, curator of Deviant Ornaments, a new exhibition at Norway’s National Museum, tells Dazed. “But there is far less visual and textual representation of female homosexuality than there is for men. What we have instead, mostly, is references and suggestions.”

Excavating the history of queerness in Islamic art, the exhibition spans over a thousand years and four continents, bringing together textiles, manuscripts, video, digital art photography, music and painting. The works are displayed without division between time periods and regions, and there are elements of Hindu aesthetics, too, including Promiscuous Intimacies, a striking bronze statue of two entwined bodies by Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander. “We are trying to challenge the boundaries of different regions and develop a relational, collaborative and tangled history,” Bhangu says. 

The exhibition has an international outlook, but it also aims to explore underrepresented parts of Norway’s own history. Two paintings used to convey a Western, Orientalist approach to Islamic art, for example, are drawn from the museum’s collection. “It was an important part of our strategy not only to bring in new things, but to present our collection in a different context and shine a new light on it,” says Ingrid Røynesdal, the National Museum’s director.

Instead of the Western model of “coming out”, Bhangu curated Deviant Ornaments in line with the concept of “letting in”, a term coined by psychologist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett which has been embraced by many queer Muslims. “The idea is about negotiating how we invite people in, who has access to our knowledge, and how to resist the visibility regimes where if you’re not visibly queer, then you don’t exist. It’s not saying one is better or safer than the other, but it’s offering a different approach to being queer,” explains Bhangu.  

Drawing on practices from his native Senegal, artist Damien Ajavon has created a new textile work, Chemin vers Oslo, which is intended to protect the space. “This idea of protection comes from myths, legends and my own personal journey,” Avajan tells Dazed. Knitted on a domestic machine from the 1980s and woven with the help of a friend, the work is adorned with dozens of amulets, which in many cultures are believed to ward off the evil eye. Together with Bhangu, Ajavon gathered these artefacts at markets all over the world, from Asia and Africa to Paris, where Ajavon lives now.

Alize Zorlutana, a Turkish-Canadian artist who works across different mediums, is also using traditional techniques in a modern context. He has recently started working with ebru, a form of marbling with water which originated in Turkey. “It’s traditionally made with paper but I’ve started translating it into textiles and ceramics,” Zolutana explains. The work is large-scale, inviting, and serene, layering ceramics with blue and white silk panels that represent bodies of water in Toronto, Turkey and Gaza. Inspired by the non-representational practices of Islamic art, they have been thinking about how to convey queerness in a more abstract way. “You might not think of this work as explicitly queer, but because I come from a culture where to be queer is much more private, I think the ways that we express it might be less obvious and more poetic,” they say.

At the other end of the representational spectrum sits Amorous Couple,an eye-catching 3D-printed sculpture by artist Rah Eleh, depicting two figures, one operating a dildo-like contraption and the other opening her legs. The sculpture is based on an illustration of a 17th-century Mughal miniature, which Eleh and Bhangu came across in their research. “There’s a story about how the king had too many wives that he couldn’t please, and they lived in the zenana (the women’s quarters),” explains Eleh. “The guards were also women but they were androgynous; they did a lot of what we would traditionally consider male roles, like combat and protecting the king. It is said that these guards would penetrate the women with carrots and cucumbers.” Much of Eleh’s work is concerned with queer futurism, and the figures have a touch of sci-fi about them, with alien eyes and a goldish, green patina created using automotive paint.

In the exhibition’s second hall, there is an arched alcove where visitors are invited to write letters to their loved ones. “It’s based around the term ‘beloved’, which is culturally specific and features in a lot of Islamic literature,” says Håkon Lillegraven, an artist and curator who is heading up the exhibition’s public engagement programme. “Noor told me that it can apply to spiritual devotion, to romantic devotion to family and to platonic relationships, which I read as a queer challenge to the hierarchy of relationships. I also thought: let’s bring back the forgotten practice of love letter writing, particularly now we’re in the post-Tinder recession.” 

The pattern for the alcove was designed by Kiki Salem, a Palestinian-American textile artist whose work draws upon the traditional Palestinian embroidery practice of Tatreez. Last May, she visited her family in the West Bank, in an area surrounded by rapidly expanding Israeli settlements and subject to increasing violence. She found 16 dresses which belonged to her step-grandmother, one of which inspired the pattern she created for Deviant Ornaments. “Most of the skirt had these intricate, arabesque peacocks,” she says. “That was the most interesting part for me: Palestinian women would base their patterns off the flora, the fauna and other aspects of daily life, then translate that into really cool geometric patterns.” Like much of the new work on display in the show, it feels both rooted in tradition and contemporary.

Deviant Ornaments was envisioned as an “architecture of pleasure”, where visitors are invited in to be dazzled by the work. But it’s hard not to read the show in relation to the current moment, when there is an ongoing effort to use queer people in Palestine as a rhetorical tool to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza and to undermine solidarity from queer communities elsewhere. Perhaps now more than ever before, queer Muslims are represented in the West as separate from their religious, cultural and national identities. 

Bhangu started working on the project back in 2021, two years before the genocide began. However, she says it is partly a response to a specific incident after she took part in the ‘No Pride in Genocide’ section of a Norwegian Pride parade. “There was so much support from the sidelines, but later that day I went on Reddit and saw a post saying, ‘Don’t [these people] know that homosexuality is punishable by 14 years in prison in Gaza and the West Bank?’ The laws that person is referencing hark back to British penal codes, which were introduced to the region, along with India and other parts of the world,” says Bhangu. “But this idea is also about portraying queer Muslims as victims, and you can see this exhibition as a response to that.” Representing queerness as a constitutive part of Islamic culture, Deviant Ornaments is a powerful antidote to the idea that these categories are irreconcilable.