Artists Reckon With 9/11 and the Surveillance That Followed

A Question of Legacy

On each September 11, New Yorkers pay tribute to the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. But the period that followed was defined not only by grief and rebuilding, but by an almost immediate campaign of Islamophobia and surveillance whose effects reshaped lives far beyond the city.

Hyperallergic asked artists, curators and culture workers from Muslim, South Asian and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities to reflect on how that day shaped their lives, 25 years into the phrase "never forget."

"The Comfort Americans Had Taken for Granted"

For Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, the images of September 11 carried a different weight. "When the second plane hit, I knew this was no accident, and I sensed at once that the comfort and security Americans had long taken for granted were gone," he recalls. Having lived through the Iran–Iraq War, Desert Storm and years in a conflict zone, he recognised the scene on screen. His first instinct was to call hospitals and ask where he could donate blood.

He also anticipated a backlash against Muslim and Arab communities, and says it followed. Walking through downtown Chicago, he was called "Bin Laden." Middle Easterners were afraid, and Muslim women feared going out in hijab. Bilal notes that political leaders used 9/11 to justify multiple wars, including the invasion of Iraq, a country he says had nothing to do with the attacks. In 2004, during the Iraq War, he lost his brother Haji.

Bilal describes how the architects of those wars fell into the very trap the attackers had set, allowing violence to breed more violence and fear to breed more fear.

Making the Figure Legible

Artist Shahzia Sikander frames the aftermath differently: Muslim and South Asian bodies, she writes, were made newly legible through surveillance, suspicion and fantasies of rescue. The figure of the "Muslim woman" became, with devastating efficiency, an alibi for war.

Sikander answered with "Pleasure Pillars" (2001), a work in vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor and tea on wasli paper. Its central head, an amalgamation of feminist thinkers and poets crowned with ram's horns, is built out of pleasure, sensuality and confidence — a direct rebuttal to any paternalistic construction of Muslim women as fragile or awaiting rescue. That head floats above torsos of Venus and Devata, and dancers drawn from Mughal and Rajput miniatures. Sikander says she insists not only on the longevity of these visual traditions but on the women who carry them.

Temporal Collisions

Sikander later added a fighter jet to the composition. She describes it not simply as an image of war, but as the collision of temporalities it produces: South Asian and Persianate visual culture, diasporic movement, gendered mythologies and the inescapable present of imperial violence.

She invokes the scholar Gayatri Gopinath, whose writing describes bodies that stay fractured, composite and illegible, their histories spiralling and overlapping rather than moving in a straight line.

What endures, 25 years on, is what Gopinath calls "the promiscuous intimacies of our shared pasts and presents." The accounts gathered here are personal, but they trace a shared institutional and cultural aftermath — one in which surveillance, war and visual tradition remain entangled.