Hajra Waheed, Hum, FRAGMENTOS, Bogotá, installation view
2026. Hajra Waheed
Entering the first exhibition space of Fragmentos, in a building inaugurated in 2018, I found only a wooden bench placed in the middle of the room. The ceiling-high lateral glass curtain walls let in bright sunlight and offered views of the building’s central garden, where a colonial house once stood: Its ruins remain among well-tended plants. After sitting down inside, I could hear a deep, rich humming that got momentarily louder when people opened the door to access the gardens—so I followed.
Encrusted in those colonial ruins was Hajra Waheed’s thirty-two-channel outdoor sound installation Hum II, 2023. The voices of several women, humming, gathered into a full-bodied, cadenced swell. And though I stood surrounded by a ravishing garden, the sound work compelled me to close my eyes and in darkness inhabit those voices instead. With remarkable force and exceptional sonic clarity, Waheed’s work proves that an uprising is also corporeal—lifted, hewn into being by the sheer vibration of a collective voice.
Hum II, first shown in 2023 at the Sharjah Biennial 15, asserts the political force of women’s voices as a structural element of resistance. The work mobilizes vocal sound as a confrontational power in which collective pressure and social rupture are articulated. Composed of seven songs tied to uprisings and anti-colonial movements across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, it foregrounds the decisive role women have played in sustaining these struggles. Even when these musical forms were censored, criminalized, or driven out of public space, they endured because women continued to transmit them, ensuring their persistence and political charge.
What might first register as the gentle musical swaying of someone humming while doing something else—imagining with eyes closed, lulling a child to sleep—can also allude to those who hum because they cannot speak, whose mouths have been shut, since humming obscures language. It can likewise become a bridge between people who share no tongue, or who are punished for speaking certain ones. Waheed’s Hum II succeeds Hum, 2020, originally commissioned for the Lahore Biennale 02, which originated in solidarity marches in Pakistan, massive mobilizations against anti-Muslim discrimination in India, and the imprisonment in Turkey (with a nineteen-year sentence) of singer-songwriter Nûdem Durak for singing in the Kurdish language.
Waheed was born in Canada and raised in Saudi Arabia, but her family hails from the Indian city of Hyderabad. In Urdu, Waheed’s mother language, Hum also means “we.” In giving that name to her work, Waheed keeps the Muslim history of Hyderabad alive, despite the massacre of Muslims following annexation by the new nation of India in 1948 and the erasure of Urdu—which, along with Telugu, is the official language of Telangana, the state whose capital and biggest city is Hyderabad—and Islamic traditions that followed. Humming, by turning the body into a resonant chamber of sustained vibration, can be understood as a microcosmic participation in nāda brahman—the classical Indian metaphysical doctrine—the primordial sonic pulse from which the universe is held to arise.
I couldn’t imagine a more fitting place to exhibit Waheed’s work. Fragmentos itself, at once a gallery managed by the National Museum of Colombia and an artwork in its own right, is the result of a project by Doris Salcedo: Its dark-gray tiled floor—which unfolds across every room of the institution—was forged from thirty-seven tons of weaponry surrendered by the FARC-EP guerrilla force after the 2016 peace accord with the Colombian government. After melting and casting the metal, Salcedo invited a group of women—survivors of sexual violence perpetrated by armed groups—to hammer and shape the floor with their own hands. Presented together, the works of Salcedo and Waheed articulate potent, nonviolent forms of resistance to the scorched histories of brutality and authoritarianism. Consonant with Salcedo’s, Waheed’s work reminds us that, at times, humming—low, resonant, and collectively sustained—can resound far more forcefully than crying out alone.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 6, February 2026
Encrusted in those colonial ruins was Hajra Waheed’s thirty-two-channel outdoor sound installation Hum II, 2023. The voices of several women, humming, gathered into a full-bodied, cadenced swell. And though I stood surrounded by a ravishing garden, the sound work compelled me to close my eyes and in darkness inhabit those voices instead. With remarkable force and exceptional sonic clarity, Waheed’s work proves that an uprising is also corporeal—lifted, hewn into being by the sheer vibration of a collective voice.
Hum II, first shown in 2023 at the Sharjah Biennial 15, asserts the political force of women’s voices as a structural element of resistance. The work mobilizes vocal sound as a confrontational power in which collective pressure and social rupture are articulated. Composed of seven songs tied to uprisings and anti-colonial movements across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, it foregrounds the decisive role women have played in sustaining these struggles. Even when these musical forms were censored, criminalized, or driven out of public space, they endured because women continued to transmit them, ensuring their persistence and political charge.
What might first register as the gentle musical swaying of someone humming while doing something else—imagining with eyes closed, lulling a child to sleep—can also allude to those who hum because they cannot speak, whose mouths have been shut, since humming obscures language. It can likewise become a bridge between people who share no tongue, or who are punished for speaking certain ones. Waheed’s Hum II succeeds Hum, 2020, originally commissioned for the Lahore Biennale 02, which originated in solidarity marches in Pakistan, massive mobilizations against anti-Muslim discrimination in India, and the imprisonment in Turkey (with a nineteen-year sentence) of singer-songwriter Nûdem Durak for singing in the Kurdish language.
Waheed was born in Canada and raised in Saudi Arabia, but her family hails from the Indian city of Hyderabad. In Urdu, Waheed’s mother language, Hum also means “we.” In giving that name to her work, Waheed keeps the Muslim history of Hyderabad alive, despite the massacre of Muslims following annexation by the new nation of India in 1948 and the erasure of Urdu—which, along with Telugu, is the official language of Telangana, the state whose capital and biggest city is Hyderabad—and Islamic traditions that followed. Humming, by turning the body into a resonant chamber of sustained vibration, can be understood as a microcosmic participation in nāda brahman—the classical Indian metaphysical doctrine—the primordial sonic pulse from which the universe is held to arise.
I couldn’t imagine a more fitting place to exhibit Waheed’s work. Fragmentos itself, at once a gallery managed by the National Museum of Colombia and an artwork in its own right, is the result of a project by Doris Salcedo: Its dark-gray tiled floor—which unfolds across every room of the institution—was forged from thirty-seven tons of weaponry surrendered by the FARC-EP guerrilla force after the 2016 peace accord with the Colombian government. After melting and casting the metal, Salcedo invited a group of women—survivors of sexual violence perpetrated by armed groups—to hammer and shape the floor with their own hands. Presented together, the works of Salcedo and Waheed articulate potent, nonviolent forms of resistance to the scorched histories of brutality and authoritarianism. Consonant with Salcedo’s, Waheed’s work reminds us that, at times, humming—low, resonant, and collectively sustained—can resound far more forcefully than crying out alone.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 6, February 2026
Hajra Waheed, Hum, FRAGMENTOS, Bogotá, installation views