In the hushed galleries of Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet, a curatorial act of retrieval is underway—one that seeks to excavate what colonial shame and religious orthodoxy have long sought to bury. ‘Deviant Ornaments’, opening pthis week, traces a thousand-year lineage of queer desire across the Islamic world, assembling more than forty objects that whisper what official histories have refused to speak aloud.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
The exhibition, conceived by Noor Bhangu, a South Asian curator working at the northern periphery of Europe, operates as both scholarship and restoration. Here, an eleventh-century bronze deity converses with Bronzino’s Venus in Shahzia Sikander’s *Promiscuous Intimacies*; there, Taner Ceylan’s semi-nude figure reclines in gold-threaded splendor, his gaze unapologetic. The show’s temporal sweep—from medieval Iran to contemporary Toronto—refuses the convenientl fiction that queerness arrived in Muslim societies only through Western import, a postcolonial contagion rather than an indigenous tradition.
This is no small matter. In most Muslim-majority nations, homosexuality remains not merely taboo but criminalized, its erasure from cultural memory an ongoing project. Yet the archive resists. A Safavid textile from 1567 holds its secrets in woven silk. An 1820 armband, gold and enamel gleaming, depicts Prince Tahmasp Mirza with an intimacy that transcends mere portraiture. Thirteenth-century wall tiles bear witness to desires that predated—and would outlast—the colonial gaze that eventually condemned them.
What Bhangu calls “the straightening of homoerotic archives” occurred, paradoxically, through the mechanism of Orientalist fascination. Nineteenth-century European travelers, titillated by the homoeroticism they encountered in Persian wine poetry and Turkish bathhouses, documented these practices with a mixture of prurience and moral condemnation. Their accounts, circulating back to the Islamic world, generated a reactive shame—a self-surveillance that led communities to disavow their own traditions. The ghazal, that exquisite poetic form celebrating beauty and desire in all its permutations, was retrospectively heterosexualized, its ambiguities resolved into orthodoxy.
The exhibition’s four commissioned works create temporal bridges. Damien Ajavon’s textile installation, *Chemin vers Oslo*, incorporates small Hands of Fatima—protective amulets that Bhangu carried from Pakistan—into a contemporary visual language. Positioned beside a nineteenth-century gold belt buckle bearing the same motif, the works trace what Bhangu calls “continuities and discontinuities,” the way symbols migrate across centuries, accumulating and shedding meanings like layers of patina.
Ali Ghulam Khanezad’s Armband with gold and enamel inlay (around 1820)Photo: The David Collection / Pernille Klemp
This curatorial strategy acknowledges difficulty without succumbing to it. Orientalist paintings, with their racializing fantasies, appear in the exhibition not as celebrations but as diagnostic tools, evidence of the colonial wound that continues to shape contemporary Islamic attitudes toward sexuality. The show’s inclusion of Sufi references and devotional imagery similarly requires careful contextualization—these are cultural and historical elements, not theological endorsements, though the distinction may be lost on those who view any association between Islam and queerness as inherently blasphemous.
Ingrid Røynesdal, the museum’s director, frames the exhibition as an opening of space—for curiosity, learning, debate. But Bhangu’s characterization feels more precise: *Deviant Ornaments* is a love letter, she says, to queer relations across geographies and generations. It is also an act of repatriation, returning to public view what was never truly lost, only hidden, archived in objects that waited patiently for someone to read them correctly.
In Oslo, far from the centers of Islamic art historical scholarship, this reckoning feels both marginal and essential—a reminder that the most important recoveries often happen at the edges, where established narratives lose their grip and other stories become possible.
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