[Minna| انم] of Us

Xaytun Ennasr, Falyakon, Anka Kassabji, Alex Khalifa, André & Evan Lenox-Samour, Elias Rischmawi, Fares Rizk a.k.a. Sultana, Basyma Saad [Minna| انم] of Us is a group exhibition co-organized by Participant Inc and Salma for of us [minna| انم[ both spaces, curated by Palestinian–Egyptian–Jordanian artist Ridikkuluz. The Arabic word اّمن) minna) comes from the saying “minna wa finna” and is a preposition meaning “of us” or “from us.” To be minna is to be claimed by a group or community as a member, understood as part of an atmosphere of queer belonging. Across the exhibition, artists pay homage to their lineages through acts of transmission, craft, and continuity of tradition — treating practice as both inheritance and offering. The artists’ work shares undercurrents of decolonizing archives, safeguarding endangered art forms, acknowledging a revolutionary landscape; and together posits a futurism that embraces identity as expansive and forever-forming. “There isn’t a doubt in affirming that this exhibition, as both a gesture and a curatorial endeavor, begins from refusal. The refusal to settle for that suffocating, airless space between the artisanal lie and the imperial lie, to find a sense of rootedness in what makes displacement legible and administratively manageable, and to accept the cynical wager, amid an ongoing genocide, that Palestinian life must be translated into familiar scripts set forth by the dehumanizing frameworks of the Euro-American liberal order so it could be mourned.” —Edwin Nasr Xaytun Ennasr is a multidisciplinary trans Palestinian artist. Her work is rooted in revolutionary cultural production and includes paintings, drawings, ceramics, and experimental videogames. I want the land, not the sky is a body of work consisting of paintings, pottery, installation, and an open edition print about the intersecting journeys of Palestinian and trans liberation, both being acts of nature manifesting itself. The title is a reworking of a quote by the late Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy who wrote in her final social media post, “The sky is sweeter than the earth; I want the sky and not the earth.” Ennasr’s work asserts: “I want the land, and I want to live in it, I don’t want the sky. I want my people with me living in the land, not in the sky.” Falyakon is a flutist, vocalist, and sound artist who crafts immersive soundscapes that fuse Palestinian field recordings with inventive production, honoring ancestral sounds while turning archival stories into intimate musical experiences, to evoke memories and cultural continuity. Anka Kassabji an interdisciplinary artist and self-taught belly dancer, whose artistic focus revolves around exploring fluidity, rhythm, movement, and creative imagery through drawing, painting, and dance. Kassabji presents a new painting — considered a self-portrait that "exists in the quiet of winter” — exploring themes of self intimacy and “forging a path where queerness and Arabness flourish side-by-side, but not in the warmth of external approval.” Alex Khalifa is a sculptor and stone carver whose work focuses on the figure, human or otherwise. Drawing from Egyptian traditions of funerary portraiture, their practice considers the face, memory across time, and the encryption of soul in earth. On view is their stone work Bust, hand-carved from alabaster between 2023 and 2026. André and Evan Lenox-Samour are a queer, identical twin, artist duo of Palestinian descent based in Brooklyn. Their practice combines ancestral craft traditions, like mother-of-pearl and olive-wood carving, with family heirlooms and found text to create abstract commemorative sculptures. The Lenox-Samour twins taught themselves how to inlay mother-of-pearl in honor of their ancestors who were master artisans of the Hasboun family in Bethlehem — a city historically revered for its prominent mother-of-pearl carving — to keep the cultural tradition alive. A new work created for this exhibition features a nightscape incorporating various stars, rich with cultural history and significance. Elias Rischmawi is a queer Palestinian multimedia artist and chef whose body of work is rooted in history and reclaiming ancestral knowledge. Grounded in archival practices, their work preserves the everyday lives and memory of their loved ones as a way of asserting presence against erasure. Through intimate portraits, personal archives, and acts of witnessing, Rischmawi explores how culture is carried through time and space, asserting that love, care, and storytelling are forms of resistance and breathing testaments to survival. Selections from their ongoing project, A Memory of Love & Loyalty, aim to preserve family history through portraits, heirlooms like family recipes, and restored family photographs. Fares Rizk a.k.a. Sultana is a Palestinian-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist based in New York City, working between painting, video, and performance. On view are. three self-portrait paintings of their alter ego, drag performer Sultana, the self- proclaimed Queen of the Middle East Village. Ridikkuluz writes, in a forthcoming essay on Sultana,“ [...] Immersing herself in the New York art world [of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s] [...] Her subjects? Lovers and nightlife legends — Amanda Lepore, Candis Cayne, Kenny Kenny, Sophia Lamar. Like most femme stories, what started off as getting in drag every Halloween turned into a full-time gig. In the ’80s, she moved through the debutante circuit. In the ’90s, she was a club kid. [...] ‘I love being on stage,’ she told me. ‘When I’m under the lights, I feel like I’m healing. From my father’s suicide, from what’s been done to Palestinians, from the art world itself.’” Basyma Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. With dark humor and an emphasis on forms of struggle, her work places scenes of intersubjective exchange within their world-historical frames. Saad’s work explores notions of mourning, spontaneity, and surplus through film, performance, sculpture, essays, and fiction. Exhibited cinematically, her 2021 short film, Congress of Idling Persons, follows DJ and translator Rayyan Abdel Khalek, musical artist Sandy Chamoun, writer Islam Khatib, and organiser Mekdes Yilma, who all play themselves, in the shadows of historic world events.

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Downtown, NY