“I want your song. I want your stories.”

Towards the end of the film Sinners (2025), just before an Irish vampire tries to kill a young African-American artist named Sammie, he growls a line that slices deeper than fangs ever could: “I want your song. I want your stories.” It’s not just a threat—it’s a thesis. A quiet confession of what the powerful have always wanted from the margins: their music, myths and meanings. Not the body, but what it carries.

That line echoed again—eerily, precisely—in March 2025, inside the sterile hush of a New Delhi gallery. Four tapestries, part of a celebrated solo exhibition by Indian artist Anita Dube, bore the words of protest poet Aamir Aziz. Lines from Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega (Nothing will be forgotten)—written in the heat of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India in 2019-20, shouted into the air by thousands—were now stitched in gold thread, hung under track lighting, priced for collection.

Aziz hadn’t been asked. He hadn’t been told. “This is not conceptual borrowing,” he wrote in a statement on a social media platform. “This is theft. This is erasure.” The words that once pulsed through streets were now disarmed and aestheticised—rendered decorative, sellable, safe.

Dube later issued an apology, calling it an “ethical lapse”, citing her past references to figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and bell hooks. However, Aziz is not history. He is neither myth nor archive. He is alive. Watching. Speaking. And in that difference lies the entire question.

Living artists, silent institutions

What does it mean to quote a living poet without their permission? To profit from their words while they are still working, still vulnerable, still protesting? The difference between citing bell hooks and borrowing from Aamir Aziz is not just temporal—it is ethical. The dead cannot withhold consent. The living can—and when they do, it must be respected.

In online posts, Aziz has repeatedly clarified that his work lives in the mouths of protestors. It is meant for banners and placards, for chants and city walls. That is not theft—it is solidarity. What happened in the gallery was not that. It was a power play wrapped in tribute, a politics of erasure masquerading as homage.

Inspiration or extraction?

From Picasso’s African influences to Anish Kapoor’s Vantablack monopoly, the history of art is entangled with unequal exchange. Picasso’s work, particularly Cubism, owes an uncredited debt to African masks and sculpture. But even if he had “credited” them, what would that mean? There was no single artist to cite. The forms came from entire cultures, built communally over generations.

This is the chasm between Western individualism—where the artist is singular, the genius original—and collectivist traditions in Africa, Asia and Indigenous worlds, where art belongs to a people, not a person. The idea of a “citation” here is already colonial, because it asks: who can you name? And when you can’t, it assumes the right to take.

Today’s South Asian art world, shaped by caste and capital, replicates that same logic. The elite artist becomes an auteur. The folk, the marginalised, the rural, become raw material. The asymmetry persists.

When art punches up

But not all appropriation is extraction. The mid-20th century Situationists used détournement (rerouting) to subvert dominant culture—remixing advertisements, comic strips and slogans to critique capitalism itself. One notable instance by the Situationist International is the comic strip Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti (The Return of the Durutti Column) created by André Bertrand in 1966, which repurposed the format of a traditional comic strip to deliver revolutionary messages, combining images and text to critique capitalist society and promote radical thought. The comic was distributed as a poster and became influential during the May 1968 protests in France.

American academic Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” walks a finer line. She imagines the lives of enslaved women erased from archives—but always acknowledges the gaps. Her interventions are honest about their fiction.

From Beyoncé to Barbara Kruger

In global pop culture, Black Is King (2020) sparked a similar debate. Beyoncé’s lush tribute to African heritage drew praise for its beauty and backlash for its flattening. Critics noted the tension: visibility vs. tokenism, tribute vs. branding. She worked with African artists—but the work still premiered on Disney+, inaccessible to most of Africa. Being Black does not exempt one from the dynamics of extraction; Beyoncé, as a wealthy Black American backed by global capital, still operates within systems that can appropriate even as they celebrate.

And then there’s American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger and streetwear brand Supreme. Kruger’s visual language—white Futura Bold text in a red box—was unmistakably echoed in Supreme’s logo. For years, she stayed silent. But in 2013, when Supreme sued a designer for parodying their logo, Kruger replied with a blank email titled fools.doc, containing just one line: “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers… I’m waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.” No spectacle—just a sentence that stripped the gloss off profit-driven theft masquerading as originality.

The lesson: it’s not just about what is taken, but who is taking—and who is allowed to.

Who gets to speak, still?

And this includes me.

I write this in English, from a place of institutional safety, with the confidence that my words will be read. I have returned from protests to a home with a lock that keeps me safe, electricity that runs all night, water that never disappears. My anger, even when it’s righteous, is buffered. My risk is limited. I am not Anita Dube, nor do I possess her visibility or influence, but I move through the same class and caste-coded spaces that shape who gets to be heard—and who gets to sell their critique.

This is what power looks like when it’s working: invisible to those who benefit from it. In Indian art, upper-caste liberalism often masquerades as radicality. Its practitioners borrow the language of resistance without ever surrendering the microphone. Even the most well-meaning actors are trained not to hear what they cannot recognise. This is not always malicious. But it is always structural. Can we name our position not to centre ourselves, but to recalibrate what we do with it? To step aside when needed, to amplify without co-opting, to ask who is not in the room—and why.

Sara Ahmed calls this institutional willfulness: when critique is met not with violence, but with polite indifference—when demands for credit are reframed as disruption. Still, willfulness matters. It resists not order, but injustice. Aziz’s protest was willful and it worked—partly. The artworks were pulled, a delayed apology issued. But the larger truth remains: gestures of radicality ring hollow when they erase context or concentrate power.

What do we owe each other?

When Aziz wrote Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega, he meant it as both witnessing and warning. We remember what you said, what you did, what you took. And we remember what you never gave back. Art doesn’t just archive beauty. It archives violence. The lines we lift carry histories. Citation is not a footnote. It is a form of power. It is a redistribution of attention, legitimacy and often—livelihood. Who we cite, how we cite and when we choose not to, decides who is remembered and who fades into the background of someone else’s spotlight.

Artistic inspiration is not the problem. Artists are inspired. We quote, we remix, we respond. But when inspiration becomes extraction—unpaid, uncredited, uninvited—it becomes theft. Especially when it travels upward: from the vulnerable to the protected, from the street to the gallery, from the collective to the signature.

Referencing the margins isn’t enough. To truly engage, one must account for what it costs to stand there—and who pays the price when credit is withheld. Ask for consent. Credit your sources. Pay the living. Contextualise the dead. Uplift the communities whose language, forms and memory you build upon.

And always, ask: Is this mine to use? And if not, what am I willing to risk to share the stage?

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.