Every year on September 11, New Yorkers pay tribute to the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center — and to the wounds of the weeks and years after. That period was defined by grief, rebuilding efforts, and, almost immediately, a vicious campaign of Islamophobia and surveillance whose effects reshaped the world as they knew it. Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal recalls, “I sensed at once that the comfort and security Americans had long taken for granted were gone.”
Bilal is one of several artists from Muslim, South Asian, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities whose lives were indelibly altered by the United States’s weaponization of the 9/11 attacks to pass the PATRIOT Act and justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty-five years into “never forget,” Hyperallergic asked artists, curators, and culture workers to share personal and artistic reflections on how that day shaped their lives. These are their stories.
