In this immersive installation, Qinza Najm explores how shame is culturally manufactured to suppress sensual agency, particularly across gendered and religious lines. Drawing on personal memory and collective ritual, the work reconfigures materials often coded as sacred or taboo.

Dyed naras—traditional South Asian trouser drawstrings, typically hidden beneath clothing and never publicly revealed—hang from ceiling to floor in a canopy that invites touch. Surrounding them are hijabs contributed by real individuals across faiths, genders, and sexualities. Together, these garments become vessels of lived experience, each carrying unspoken histories of regulation and resistance.

Layered with hand-painted tapestries, sound, and domestic objects, the installation blurs the threshold between private and public, sacred and profane. What emerges is not a spectacle of transgression but a site of reclamation: a space to confront inherited shame, unlearn silence, and reimagine pleasure as a right—not a risk.