Queer Mubarak currently on view in New York City

Imagined and co-curated by Humanity in Action Fellow Alfee Rubayet, Queer Mubarak is an art and audio exhibition currently on view at Gül Gallery in New York City.

Running across three weekends—June 6–8, 12–15, and 19–22 from 1–6 PM—and opening on the rare alignment of Eid-ul-Azha and Pride Month, Queer Mubarak brings together the work of 22 artists and 18 musicians across diasporas and motherlands shaped by the afterlives of colonialism, from the Balkans to Bengal and beyond. This multidisciplinary show includes visual art, photography, installations, short films, recorded music, and live DJ sets

Funded by a $20,000 Bertha Foundation Artivism grant, Queer Mubarak is more than an exhibition—it is a curatorial act of resistance. The show centers artists from economic and cultural peripheries, ensuring they are honored and compensated through artist honorariums. In doing so, it challenges imperial histories that have overwritten queer presence across regions often mischaracterized as monolithic “lands of Islam.” Instead, it reasserts local, fluid, and decolonial queer narratives.

At a time when queerness is increasingly either co-opted or erased, Queer Mubarak celebrates while complicating. It honors lived experience, refuses flattening categories, and foregrounds resistance—not just as defiance, but as a generative, joyful force. This is not queerness spoken about us, but by us: a love letter from the margins, reimagining what it means to take up space, to remember, and to resist.