The Pakistani artist Rabbya Naseer has pulled out of her solo exhibition at the Belvedere 21 Museum of Contemporary Art due to what she is alleges is censorship from the Vienna art space.
Naseer says that over a period of seven months the institution refused to green-light any of her proposals, some of which responded to the conflict in Gaza. In December she released a video response detailing her withdrawal from the exhibition, which was due to open in February.
“I am writing to tell you, in the gentlest possible way, that I do not feel obliged to let you tell me what I can or cannot make work about,” she says in the video, reading out from a letter to the curators. “You cannot tell me that my work for the exhibition at Belvedere 21 cannot be about this or that geographical region or ethnic group. You cannot tell me I cannot critique this or that colonial regime.”
Naseer, who is based between Lahore and Vienna, won the Belvedere Art Award last May. The prize carries with it €20,000 and an exhibition at the museum, which would have been Naseer’s first solo institutional show. She says she met with the curators in June and spoke about the fact that her work, which typically responds to her immediate surroundings, would likely refer to the experience of watching the desecration of human life in Gaza on social media.
In July, she says she presented the museum’s director, Stella Rollig, and curators Christiane Erharter and Luisa Ziaja with a proposal for four installations. They included a video of her learning dabke, the traditional folk dance from the Levant region that is now a symbol of Palestinian statehood, and another video piece featuring texts about decolonisation by John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Mahmoud Darwish, and others. The curators took until September to get back to her, according to Naseer, and did not give any firm approvals. She had already begun hiring technicians and other collaborators.
By the end of the year she was still waiting to move ahead, and in December the curators rescinded the invitation to include new work and asked that she show existing pieces instead. In response, Naseer filmed a half-hour video presenting the limits the Belvedere 21 had placed on her freedom of expression, which she sent to the museum as her reply. At this point the museum removed all mentions of her forthcoming exhibition from their website.
The Belvedere 21 disputes aspects of Naseer’s account of events but declined to provide details. In a statement, a spokesperson reiterated the need for the museum to present two sides of a dialogue on the contentious issue of the war in Gaza.
The museum has already been called out for censorship around the conflict in the region. As part of a group exhibition in October 2023 the Polish artist Joanna Zabielska dedicated her work to two refugees, one from Palestine and one from Lebanon. According to an open letter describing the episode, the museum removed the names of the refugees from the work without the artist’s consent. When Zabielska realised, at the opening, she reinstated them in pencil on the wall. Ultimately she withdrew her work from the show in protest at the museum’s censorship and what the letter describes as their failure to take accountability for it.
Naseer’s video, titled dinner-party (my first museum-solo), responds not only to the specific circumstances of her exhibition but also to the larger system of political censorship among art-world centres of power. She has now made three version of the video, which are all publicly available on YouTube, and they have circulated widely on social media.
“People have been reaching out with compliments that I am not worthy of at all,” Naseer says. “They call me brave and courageous—but for me, this is the simplest thing I could do. Calling my response brave and courageous puts it out of reach, like something only some of us can do. But I want to normalise it, to show that all of us can refuse to comply with institutional demands to stay silent.”
