Marwan Bassiouni: 'New British Views'

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https://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/exhibitions/271/overview/

Workplace is delighted to present an exhibition of new photographs from Marwan Bassiouni’s ongoing series New British Views, in which the Swiss artist captures the English landscape as framed by the windows of mosques and Islamic prayer rooms. Inspired by the long history of immigration in Britain following the country’s colonial past, Bassiouni spent time travelling across the UK to investigate how its landscape and architecture can be observed anew from the perspective of the religious sites of its Islamic communities. Through this journey, which echoes those undertaken by the artist in the Netherlands and Switzerland, Bassiouni challenges the stereotypes and clichés associated with the representation of Arab culture and Islamic religion within Western countries.

In New British View #29 a window looking out into an unmistakably English street sits above a radiator surrounded by bare white walls and an ornate carpet, an image that is at once immediately recognisable yet unfamiliar to most. By depicting ordinary spaces through new perspectives, Bassiouni invites us to reconsider our viewpoints and questions the phenomenon of ‘othering’, which affected the artist first-hand whilst growing up with dual Egyptian and American-Italian heritage, and as a Muslim in a small secular town in Switzerland. In Bassiouni’s New British Views one is confronted with an unexpected representation of Islamic communities in the West, one where similarities and common experience are in focus and beauty is found in the harmonious co-existence of different spaces and perspectives.

Although the photographs in the exhibition appear to be precisely composed, they are unstaged and are the result of a selective framing of existing scenes. The artist uses multiple exposures in a single image, causing the foreground and background to appear equally focussed and creating an evenly distributed light. Through this technique Bassiouni situates his photographs in close relation to the Dutch Golden Age paintings of domestic spaces with views to the outside world. In doing so he eliminates the hierarchy between interior and exterior spaces, and also between the specific interiors of his images, known only to those who frequent these places of worship, and the exterior landscape that is shared by all.