Is it what you think?

What has society subjected a woman to? How is she judged — her clothes, her smile, her walk, her protest? What triggers the question in the first place? Is it some basic decency women are assumed to owe the world? Or is it a choice, never consciously made, to refuse to let her body become a surface for other people to read?

Who gave men the liberty to walk bare-bodied, and not women? How did this quiet, subconscious idea — the body as a sacred temple requiring guard — get planted in a girl's head to begin with? Is it protection or is it a cage? And who, exactly, gets to decide?

Rummana Hussain staged Is it what you think? at the Kaskadenkondensator gallery in Basel, Switzerland, in 1998. She sat on a plain wooden chair in black lace undergarments and a parandi — a long, artificial plait cascading from her hair — a black chador draped across her in a way that didn't fully conceal what was underneath: the scars of a mastectomy, and the prosthesis beneath. Onto her body, images of Iranian hijabi women holding guns played in slow rotation, alternating with her own self-portraits in the veil. As the projections moved across her skin, she read aloud, in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, from a book wrapped like the Holy Quran — a long, unbroken litany of questions the world had apparently already decided the answers to. Where does she belong? Is she behind a veil? Does she have breasts, or has she had a mastectomy? Can she bear the pain? At the end of the reading, she removed the chador, then the prosthesis, and walked away.

She had been diagnosed with cancer three years earlier, in 1995. By 1998, in a Basel gallery, with her own scarred body doing the arguing, she was no longer answering the world's questions. She was returning them, unanswered, to the room. Unlike Alex Colville's Studio — which is a life looking back at itself, whole and settled — this is a life still mid-argument with its own ending, refusing to resolve before it has to.

Her identity as a Muslim woman had, for years by that point, invited doubt disguised as curiosity — about her choices, her character, her morals. Is it what you think? doesn't answer those doubts. It exposes them, and turns them back outward: Is she me? Is she you? Would you accept that?

The turn toward this kind of work had a precise origin. In December 1992, a mob demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya; the communal violence that followed reached Mumbai, where Hussain lived. A woman who had, until then, moved through the art world as a cosmopolitan, secular figure found herself abruptly read as something narrower — a Muslim artist, first, an artist second. That fracture is what pushed her body itself into becoming the material of her work, and Is it what you think? is one of its last, most exposed forms.

She used her own ailing body as the site where the politics imposed on a woman's body could finally be witnessed directly, not argued about in the abstract. She wasn't claiming a right or a wrong. She was insisting that a woman's choices are individual, and refuse to be filed under a category. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, writing later in The Agony of Eros, describes how categorising and comparing flattens the atopos — the very placelessness, the resistance to being located — that separates one person from another, folding distinct beings into a single, manageable "same." That is precisely the violence Hussain's projections perform and then refuse: armed women, veiled women, her own body, all thrown onto one surface as if they were one woman, before her live presence — mastectomy scar and all — insists otherwise.

By setting images of armed, revolutionary Muslim women directly against her own private, domestic vulnerability, she didn't only puncture the stereotype of the passive, voiceless minority woman. She punctured the act of categorising itself. Every woman standing beneath the same chador carries a different history, a different faith, a different threshold for pain — and all of it, Hussain insists, deserves to be respected, not speculated on from a distance.