a profound feeling of art
ahmed umar, woke art, mexico city
I went to Mexico City for a month, to visit and stay with my close friend Evelyn F who lives out there, to work on my book—this went very well, I’m really pleased, I am not sure there is a better feeling than seeing this strange thing start to uncurl. I wrote every morning at this cherry-wood desk Eve has in her living room, which is up against a large window the length of a wall that faces a jacaranda tree. I would write until the sun would warm my page so much that I had to move. By the time I left Mexico City, the branches were heaping with thick handfuls of lilac flowers. An iPhone video couldn’t do it justice, but take a look.
About a week in, I decided to visit Museo Universitario del Chopo, in San Rafeal, because it had an exhibit by the Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar, who my boyfriend had described to me as the star of the Venice Biennale. Not that I was quite sure what “star” implied, but I looked them up, and learned that he had been caught in the crossfire of criticism that was being directed at “woke” or “DEI” works that seemed to make their identity the subject matter and merely performed the aesthetic traditions of their ancestors in new iterations.
Naturally, I was intrigued. I booked a taxi over and got in a car with its seats plastered with blurry images of American license plates. I asked the driver in high school Spanish about the plates, at which point he realized that I was American. He started asking me about the Gulf of America and the tariffs, very kindly and jovially, although I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed and confused about how to respond, not just because of my elementary Spanish, but because of a mild, squinting headache the altitude had given me, and because the news had happened so suddenly that I hadn’t been able to feel anything but disgust at how joyously the new regime went about being cruel, at the general hardness and cynicism that people were proud to espouse, I had watched that ASMR reel of someone getting deported by the White House.
He asked whether I was on vacation, I said yes, I can work remotely, as we passed through the parts of Mexico City that Americans have grown particularly fond of, and we passed a restaurant in which I had eaten soft blue corn tacos with sharply crisped-up pineapples folded into them and drizzled with salsa macha, had ripped open spicy bean and queso fresco tamales to make for their soft, sweet flesh, milled around the various newspaper stands that had Trump’s face on them with arancel written in bold.
The man asked about the location I was going to, I said there’s this exhibit you should see, he nodded no to the idea politely, and then we got to the museum. I thanked him, stepped into the light with this headache still in tow, and went inside. I paid the foreigner’s fee, then took the elevator upwards, which opened into Ahmed Umar’s exhibit.
And then I had a profound experience of art.
I’m being really, truly sincere. I don’t care if it sounds over-eager. I haven’t had something like this happen in years, and I hope it happens for you too.
Umar’s exhibit had three rooms. In the first was Talitin, the Third, a film in which Ahmed Umar performs a traditional wedding dance usually done by Sudanese women, a practice that predates Islam in the region. According to Umar, the dance has been shoved underground in recent decades, especially after a new Sharia government was appointed. I didn’t know any of this while watching. The film was beautiful. Umar was dressed in a revealing scarlet fringe that glittered with gold baubles and threads, and had several beaded and bejeweled necklaces dangling from their neck. He danced, lit-up, against a pitch-black background, repetitively, rhythmically.
The second room had an exhibit, Carrying the Face of Ugliness—the photos you see throughout this newsletter, set in black-and-white, with Umar looking directly at the camera. Through the wall text, I learned that Umar was among the first people to come out in Sudan on social media in the 2010s. He faced threats and had to leave the country. But then he returned, and in this exhibit, he stands in front of others who haven’t been able to come out themselves.
In the third room was another film, Truth Bears No Scandal. Ahmed is wearing a periwinkle suit, hair blown out, pastel green and gold and purple eyeshadow glittering, singing old Sudanese pop songs that have queer undertones. I stayed in this room for about ten minutes, and afterwards, I went downstairs and outside into the cool air. I sat in a red pavilion by the artist Jeronimo Hagerman, vines snaking up around the sides, and I started to cry.
I would not describe myself as sentimental or an easy crier. In fact, I tend to be a little leathery and prefer to power through my feelings, and am usually only able to cry around my boyfriend. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.
I don’t know if I would have cried about the exhibit if I had seen it in New York, if I had caught the C train, let’s say, up to The Whitney. Let’s say it was showing on the ground floor. I would have walked the long avenue over, looked at the catalog of exhibits, and created some sort of idea in my mind about what The Whitney was doing, would have wondered whether a show like this wasn’t just a weak attempt at “resistance” when there were much more material, non-art actions that the museum could take to address how the new administration was treating trans people.
But here. I found myself pulling up photos from the exhibit when I was writing the next day. I told everyone about what I’d seen, but I could never quite share what was special—it wasn’t just the obvious things, the repressive conservatism of the environment, Umar’s extreme bravery, their instinct to return to the place that had oppressed them and to stand up for others.
Nor was it just the photos—their seeming mundanity, because at first they are just pictures of Umar standing in front of someone, and then there is a sudden understanding that the embrace is actually protective, the person with their head-on-shoulder is hiding.
The criticism of Umar was that he isn’t making art. What he is doing is carrying in a ritual from Sudan to “foreign” viewers and re-performing it with a Western liberal bent.
But when I think of Umar in those photos, hands clasped with strangers. The stakes to make the work, and the composition of the films and the photographs, and that their work could reach someone like me, from so far away, and move me, it feels ungenerous. I can’t help but think it feels small and shoddy to index and try and fit a work as beautiful as Umar’s into this stingy discourse, without addressing its beauty. It reduces the work to a single angle in a long-running discourse. It focuses on the radical nature of the show—dissecting whether it is radical or not—and completely misses that Umar has managed to make something profoundly beautiful despite this radicalism, in spite of it, or alongside it.
Who knows, maybe that’s just me, maybe if I saw Umar’s work elsewhere I wouldn’t have been able to see its beauty. The whole thing relied so much on the conditions of my life at that moment, and I was lucky to have it.
It is well-known that I have a sort of salt-of-the-earth, hyper-proud relationship with Queens. I think it is the best possible place for a person to grow up for reasons I won’t explain here. There’s a new exhibit at the Queens Museum opening Sunday, featuring artist Umber Majeed, whose show is about the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964-65 World’s Fair, about bootlegs, broken phones, cheap copies. My interview here on Hell Gate. I was especially lucky to work with a really excellent and thorough editor, Esther Wang, one of my favorite I’ve ever gotten to work with.
There is a fundraiser going to support Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. resident arrested for pro-Palestine activism at Columbia, with legal defense, family support, and more. I’m not always sure of my thoughts around fundraisers, but I don’t know how else to help. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
a treat to read this, Meghna!