‘Disappeared in America,’ a multimedia installation about American Muslims detained in the post-9/11 dragnet, is opening at the Queens Museum of Art this Sunday. A friend of mine has a short film playing at the installation, whose title sounds like a reference to Pinochet’s Chile. Suketu Mehta and Meena Alexander will read at the opening reception, which also features a discussion with artist Shahzia Sikander, refreshments and a DJ.

Since 9/11, approximately 3,000 American Muslim men have been detained in a security dragnet. To date, none have been prosecuted on terrorism charges. The majority of those detained were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. They are the recent immigrants who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers…

Already invisible in New York, after detention, they have become “ghost prisoners.”  In this, there are eerie parallels to… the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants after anarchists bombed the Attorney General’s home; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans… and the HUAC Black-listing under Senator Joseph McCarthy.

DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA is a walk-through installation that uses video, soundscapes, photos, objects, and the audience’s interactions to humanize the faces of the “disappeared.”

The installation is part of a major desi art double-header at the Queens Museum. One show is ‘Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now,’ the other is ‘Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India,’ in conjunction with the Asia Society. Very worth checking out.

Fatal Love features contemporary photographic, print, video, web-based and installation works by 28 emerging and established American artists of South Asian descent… because of tumultuous political state of the subcontinent, diaspora artists are again considering the ways in which the legacy of South Asia’s Independence and partition is manifest both in the local (US) communities and “back home.”