For the 2023 MESA conference panel, Art as an Embodied Practice of Time, I will investigate decolonial practices within contemporary art and photography as it pertains to identity narratives of the queer Middle Eastern diaspora in North America and Europe. My work interrogates the performance of queerness, the performance of Arabness, and their intersections by reflecting on modern sexual identity, its relationship to colonialism, and how contemporary queer visual artists disrupt linear identity narratives. This investigation will nuance Middle Eastern art research and cultural studies by theorizing the place of queer and/or gay studies in terms of the art of the Middle East, and making central histories of colonial empire within discussions of diasporic sexualities. In focusing on the diaspora in North America and Europe, this research emphasizes themes of migration, displacement, transnationalism, and examines how queerness is performed within artistic practice and how culturally diverse contemporary artists operate within the context of the West. Through the analysis of the visual works of artists Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, 2Fik, Laurence Rasti, Nilbar Güreş, and Alireza Shojaian, my research investigates the localized negotiations of gender and sexual non-normativity, expanding and enriching our understandings of both the ‘Middle East’ and ‘North America’ as visual discursive categories. This research decolonizes, and thus queers, western neo-orientalist and racist projections of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia region as a zone of sexual oppression. It therefore re-positions the queer Middle Eastern diaspora as a source of radical agency, a critical response to the whiteness of queer studies. It serves the urgent need to respond to the violent orientalizing global formations that currently frame the queer Middle Eastern subjects in the Global North.