NYC

DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA

A Film Trilogy & Multimedia Installation

Queens Museum of Art February 27, 2005 until June 5, 2005

VISIBLE, a collective of Muslim and other Artist-Activists, will premiere their exhibition

DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA at the Queens Museum of Art. This show will be presented as part of FATAL LOVE, a major exhibition of South Asian arts in the Diaspora.

DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA is a walk-through installation that uses a film trilogy, soundscapes, photos, objects, and the audience's interactions to humanize the faces of "disappeared" Muslims. Since 9/11, approximately 3,000 American Muslim men have been detained in a security dragnet. To date, none have been prosecuted on terrorism charges. The majority of those detained were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. Already invisible in New York, after detention, they have become "ghost prisoners."

VISIBLE is a collective, formed by a group of Muslim and other Artists and Activists. Our work confronts, challenges and undermines distorted and limited images held up by the current media and government. This work can complement the legal activism of groups like ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights and Not In Our Name. DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA uses art in a museum space to deconstruct a global climate of Islamophobia.

The collective is directed by Naeem Mohaiemen. Collective members are Ibrahim Quraishi, Ron Kiley, Aziz Huq, Vivek Bald, Anandaroop Roy, Shahed Amanullah, Sarah Olson, Kristofer Dan-Bergman, Anjali Malhotra, Sehban Zaidi, Donna Golden, Amy Heuer, and Toure Folkes. The collective also works with organizations such as Not In Our Name, Islamic Circle of North America, Shobak.Org and Alt.Muslim.

info@disappearedinamerica.org

DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA: A FILM TRILOGY

Part 1: A PATRIOT STORY

INS Case X is a Pakistani scientist living in New York. After 9/11, he was arrested and put in maximum-security jail for five months-- a "ghost prisoner", lost to the outside world. Even after release, he has been fighting a two-year battle with the INS to be allowed to stay here and live with his American wife and children. Does he still want to live here after all this? The answer is a curious mix of optimism and exhaustion.

Part 2: FEAR OF FLYING

"My original name was Swaleh Khalid. My father was trying to admit me to a Karachi school. But the Principal told his the school was only for Shi'ite students. He advised my father to change my name. So from that day, I became Khalid Hossain.! Who knew, back then, that one day there would be someone called Saddam Hussein." One man's Kafkaesque travels on the No-Fly list.

Part 3: LINGERING

New York wakes to a day when the neighborhood fruit seller, bagel vendor, taxi driver and even the multi-tasking corporate banker disappear from our lives. A surrealist vision of a ghost town and dream state living.

MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION

A combination of audio interviews with detainees, installation piece where audiences uncover the names and laws, photographs of detainees and their families and aural soundscapes. All pieces were specially commissioned by Queens Museum for the project.

The project will also launch an interactive website, which will have a life beyond the museum installation. In addition to all the elements of the installation, the website will\ include a database of names of people detained since 9/11. Visitors to the site will be able to ad! d other names (with verified sources). Through this interactive work, we hope to eventually document every American Muslim detained since 9/11.