The collection of work featured in ALHAMDU | MUSLIM FUTURISM asks what a bright future might look like for Muslim communities and engages visitors in new ways.
This article is part of our Radical Futures series, a continuation of the ideas explored in Southwest Contemporary Vol. 10
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO—The walls of the ALHAMDU | MUSLIM FUTURISM exhibition are decidedly not white.
“The base is pink. There are stripes. There’s a kind of a maximal aesthetic that suggests a shift,” says Michael Christiano, director of visual arts at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, which will host the most recent and largest iteration of the traveling showcase of experiential art that explores Muslim Futurism.
ALHAMDU, created by MIPSTERZ, a collective of Muslim and allied artists from across the country, is on display until January 11 at the center.
“If you’re familiar with going to museums, you’ll walk into the galleries and understand that this is not a typical presentation of work, and maybe it cues you into the other [details] that you should be looking for that might not be a conventional way of doing things,” he says.
The collection of work featured in the exhibition asks what a bright future might look like for Muslim communities and engages visitors in new ways. In the immersive installation New Maqam City (2024), audio samples and video come alive and allow the user to create their own piece of art.
Much like Afrofuturism, which connects history, fantasy, and future to the Black diaspora and rubbed out ancestry, the movement orbits the idea of a future free from oppression and envisions a utopic tomorrow.
“We wanted to be thoughtful about using the term ‘futurism’,” says Abbas Rattani, founder of MIPSTERZ. “Afrofuturism is born out of Black descendants living in a very real dystopia. It was a way to engineer a future where Black folks could thrive without dependence on white systems that continued to oppress them.”
In 2022, the collective held a three-day conference for artists, academics, and other stakeholders to weigh in on Muslim Futurism, what it can borrow from previous movements, and how it can contribute to a better future. Colorado College, where the FAC is located, is the home institution of several scholars who were involved in those conversations.
The traveling exhibition’s visit to Colorado Springs—where the Muslim community comprises only a few thousand people—doesn’t look identical to its previous stops in Iowa City, Iowa, Durham, North Carolina, New York City, or other cities. ALHAMDU evolves through its programming components and calls for local submissions.
“During these events people will raise very interesting ideas I’ve never heard or connected the dots on before,” Rattani says.
In Colorado, the FAC will host two iterations of a “Spotlight Series,” which Rattani describes as a TED-talk meets house-party. The series features everything from scholarly talks to experiential performances.
“It’s all meant to explore, in the broadest way possible, dimensions of Muslim culture and sometimes those are very oblique relationships,” Christiano says. “You might be listening to someone wondering, how does this relate? But as it goes on, it reveals itself. In that way, it feels like [the exhibition] represents the kind of broad connections across cultures that, in this case, are bound together through a particular shared faith, even though the faith is shared by people who are geographically dispersed across the globe.”
For the first time in the exhibition’s history, local artists took the call for submissions as an opportunity to submit work on behalf of Palestinian artists living in Gaza.
“I wasn’t surprised by it. I wasn’t expecting it, but it is characteristic of what I’ve come to experience in communities of artists, where folks are generally not just supportive of one another, but thinking about how to leverage their own position in support of one another,” Christiano says. “That felt like a really affirming display of how we can lift each other up in clear ways.”
Going beyond the art and thinking deeply about the questions Muslim Futurism poses is a core component for creators and curators of ALHAMDU. There’s often been a one-dimensional understanding of Islamic art based on how museums across the U.S. and western Europe have come to catalogue and curate it, Rattani says. But MIPSTERZ have created a three-dimensional view that is entirely curated from within the culture.
Even so, it’s an exhibition that can transcend differing cultures.
“I would like people to bring something to the exhibit that would help them take away the most: suspended judgment and an open mind,” Rattani says. “In doing so, I think they’ll walk away with an open heart and more questions that inspire thought and creativity in their personal lives. We include everyone in this utopic exercise.”
On October 4 at 4 pm, the Fine Arts Center will present a FAC Member Tour of the exhibition, followed by their First Friday Art Party.
