The Curation of Difference, Diasporas in Archive: A Living Document Breathing Through Memory

This document is a dialogue of questions in the erasure of racialized Muslimah from the state-sanctioned institution, the Aga Khan Museum, settling on colonial Canada. Its framework is founded in an understanding of memory as having physical qualities, and material implications in its moment of recollection, museumization, and visualization. In juxtaposition to the critique of the Museum, and the colonial visual landscape of Canada more broadly, a public memoir through a collection of artwork, and a dialogue to follow. In it, three Muslimah-Canadian artists: Faduma Mohamed, Nasim Asgari, and Hiba Abdallah, which not only illuminate the variances of (mis)representation which claim a cultural production of knowledge in Canada, but also speak and curate themselves into existence, and thus enact resistance. This thesis is written to be a document of doing; an active public space which divests of whiteness, and the colonial inclination to erase, commodify, and barter bodies of difference in its presence.M.A