Secrecy is Immoral

The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar in Education City, Doha, presents "Secrecy is Immoral", a group exhibition from 27 October to 3 December 2026. It shows work by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Lennart Lahuis, Aseel AlYaqoub, Amad Ansari and the collective Slavs and Tatars. The works range from objects and installations to a piece made of books and a metal kebab skewer, and an online archive of early Palestinian web pages. The opening reception is on 4 November, from 6.30pm to 8pm.

The title is taken from a line by the writer Ziauddin Sardar, who argues that knowledge and wisdom are not goods to trade. The exhibition starts from a principle within Islam that binds learning to ethics, and that treats knowledge as a trust, or amanah, held for the good of everyone. Against this it sets the modern habit of turning ideas into patented property. The artists look at how knowledge travels. They question inherited histories and the power behind them, keep records of resistance and cultural memory, and test scattered, non-linear routes of exchange.

AlYaqoub, an artist and writer from Kuwait who works through research, studies how buildings, material culture and archives shape memory and identity. The exhibition page reproduces her works Good Values (2021) and Congratulations (2022). In 2026 she won the Ithra Art Prize. Ansari, who works as a technologist as well as an artist, presents Palestine Online (2023 onwards). The project gathers web pages made by Palestinians and their friends, mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, recovered from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Rasheed works with written, spoken and visual language through installation, video, publishing and software; her work We/Whet dates from 2025. Lahuis exposes visual information to evaporation, erosion and other natural processes, and is represented by a work from his Hydrology series. Slavs and Tatars, founded in 2006, takes as its territory the stretch of Eurasia from the former Berlin Wall to the Great Wall of China. Its works include Mother Tongues and Father Throats (2012) and Kitab Kebab (For the birds) (2025). The show is organised with Tasmeem Doha 2026, the art and design biennial of VCUarts Qatar, whose theme this year is Transmit.