We are living in the world that 9/11 made. Against asinine and myopic celebrations of New York as a metropolis where a much maligned minority of Muslims and Arabs has suddenly found its voice, Ridikkuluz’s timely, urgent and apocalyptic (both ruinous and revelatory) paintings force us to think otherwise. The New York native’s most ambitious and challenging show yet forces us to face the discomfiting truths that the self-congratulatory celebrants of Muslim and Arab excellence would rather look over. Across eight epic works, Ridikkuluz refuses polite compliance. Violence is what made us who we are—and Ridikkuluz rejects the demand of the dominant to defang our multicultural identities of the mordant political projects that impel them.

Indeed biting—nibbling, chewing, sucking, kissing, licking, slobbering— is at the heart of the work. Canine figures (the klab of the show’s title) emerge as a surprising if constant companion to, even the key to comprehending, the dehumanization of the artist’s people. We see a Christ child mauled by a dog, a an overfed settler kissing the lips of her mutt as the Palestinian landscape is eviscerated by Israeli bombs and forced to endure starvation, George W Bush, a man responsible for the death of nearly one million Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis, painting a portrait of a pooch. Dogs are gods in a West that cannot conceive of Arabs as human.

Refusing the deification of these canines, in Ridikkuluz’s later paintings they become anthropized. They are turned into stand-ins for an all-too-human violence. The canine figure becomes a way of drawing a direct lineage between 9/11 and 10/7: from the use of dogs as torture instrument in the War on Terror to defile Muslims of their ritual purity to the emergence of the elite IDF K-9 unit Oketz unit, which turns hounds into direct weapon of war. Since 10/7 it’s been reported that Muhammad Bhar, an autistic man with Down’s Syndrome, was mauled to death by a band of such animals and Tahrir Husni, a pregnant woman was attacked so violently that she miscarried.

For many viewers echoes of Goya, Manet and TK will be obvious. But there’s another history that this work recalls: the mid-century Arab modernism of Samir Rafi’ for whom scenes of bestiality, featuring a typically male dog with a nude woman, became symbols of patriarchal violence. Ridikkuluz’s images thrum with a comparable carnality. In doing so, the artist forces us to contend with the fact that this kind of violence shares with the sexual a self-propelling insatiability that exceeds all utility, instrumentality or logic.

Perhaps logic was 9/11’s greatest casualty, Ridikkuluz’s absurd montages seem to remind us. With the collapse of the West’s fantasy of its impregnable self emerged an enduring paranoia about the insurgent Muslim, paranoically perceived to be everywhere. Rand Fine’s hysterical cries to institute legislation to “protect puppies from Sharia” are but one symptom of this abiding malady.

Amid this muddlement, the work knowingly acknowledges that it will be persistently misrepresented by the viewer – who might mistake the hand of a Christian for that of a Muslim, or who may confuse horror on horror for frivolous humour. Ridikkuluz therefore doesn’t seek to correct misrepresentation—as so many of us spent the decades after 9/11 attempting to do— but instead to exploit it. You think you have the authority to name me, it says, but you don’t even have the authority to name yourself. You think this is one sick joke, but the joke is in fact on you. Perhaps in this way, Ridikkuluz’s work is sadistic, but as such it forces us, the viewers, to contend with what it is that we do when we enter their world in which dogs are deities and where no one can any longer tell where the line between human and inhuman lies. Ridikkuluz challenges us: You think you can’t look but in fact you can’t look away. You think you are a witness but you’re just a voyeur. You think you’re a viewer but you’re, in fact, just a spectator."

By Hussein A H Omar