Interview conducted for Art21 over email in 2025 by Murtaza Vali. Original photography for Art21 by Czar Kristoff J. Portin. All other photography courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila.

Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in art periodicals and exhibition catalogues for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries. Vali is an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he organized the widely-acclaimed group exhibitions Crude (2018-19), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia and North Africa, and Guest Relations (with Lucas Morin) (2023-24), a sequel exhibition examining hotels and the hospitality industry across the Global South. He is also the curator of Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, an itinerant research and curatorial platform investigating the lingering trauma and legacy of partitions in South Asia and beyond. First appearing in Manual for Treason, a publication commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), subsequent iterations of this project have been presented at the Jameel Arts Centre (2022-23) and Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2023).