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Artist Mahtab Hussain was in his 20s in July 2005, when 4 terrorists detonated selfmade bombs in separate, coordinated suicide assaults throughout rush hour in London. As a younger British-born Muslim with Pakistani heritage, Hussain discovered himself amongst these on the frontline of a renewed wave of Islamophobia and racial profiling within the UK. The experiences of rising up within the publish 9/11, 7/7 period as a younger Muslim man instilled in him a hysterical stress “to alter myself”, he says.
5 years later, in 2010, West Midlands police began placing up CCTV cameras throughout Birmingham – 218 cameras had been put in, a few of them hidden – most in majority Muslim areas of the town. Mission Champion because the surveillance scheme was recognized, was dismantled a 12 months later, after complaints from the group and an unbiased evaluate – however the scars stay. Hussain’s exhibition What Did You Need to See? at Ikon is his visceral response to the ignominy of Mission Champion, and the catharsis of coming collectively as a group in its wake.
The present begins by reclaiming the gaze on the group from the suspicious, watchful eyes of the state. Hussain grew up between Druids Heath and Handsworth, and clearly remembers when the cameras went up – it was the identical 12 months he picked up the digital camera himself. Within the summers of 2023 and 2024 he returned to {photograph} each mosque in Birmingham. The 160 images mimic the surveillance photographs, shot at the same distance from the buildings as a normal safety digital camera. However these footage don’t pry. Organized in a Becher-like grid, they’re a typology of mosque structure and group areas. Some are hanging for his or her ordinariness – housed in run-down residential terraces, and in a single case, a former church. It’s in these unmarked and unrecognisable websites Hussain reveals what he means by the humility and tenacity of making an attempt to mix in. If you flip round you discover a dusty reclaimed CCTV digital camera within the nook of the gallery, pointing proper at you.
Hussain additional explores this fraught rigidity between being seen and being watched in a sequence of latest portraits. He’s recognized principally as a portrait photographer, and this new physique of labor sees him shift to extra classical black and white to painting people from Birmingham’s various Muslim group. Although this exhibition proves there’s far more to Hussain than portraits, that is nonetheless the place he excels; notably in depicting a sure type of machismo. One male topic in a Canada Goose jacket scowls on the digital camera, his mouth curled, forehead arched – Hussain doesn’t attempt to mollify or make his topics seem susceptible, figuring out that these portraits enable folks to be what they’re, or not less than what they need to be.
A younger man in a white vest postures and tugs on the chain round his neck, like a 90s pop idol; a labourer in black gloves lugs a tyre on his shoulder; an older man carrying a pakol hat smiles on the digital camera. There isn’t a frequent style, gesture, pores and skin tone – solely their religion that joins these topics. Maybe the standout is Hussain’s portrait of his mom – poised with a cigarette, commanding magnificence and energy. Her gaze says it – I’m right here to remain. On the centre of the present is an area with video directions on find out how to use the mats and say the prayers offered. It’s a reminder of the areas that stay fixed, the religion that’s untouched by prying eyes.
If this set up seems to the longer term, the lyrical new movie piece subsequent door, made with the novelist and playwright Man Gunaratne, seems again. It’s a quick-paced, lo-fi mashup of archival and new footage, influenced by Derek Jarman and Arthur Jafa, telling the story of British Asians and Muslims. The narration is cribbed from legendary British-Pakistani actor Zia Mohyeddin’s Right here At this time, Right here Tomorrow, a movie concerning the plight of the Asian group in Britain, made in Birmingham within the late Seventies.
There are these searing flashes once more, the sting of making an attempt to slot in: childhood footage of Hussain’s household, performing within the college nativity play. A gaggle of Liverpool followers belt out the Mo Salah chant: “If he scores one other few, then I’ll be Muslim too.” The footage strikes between hovering pleasure and surprising brutality, between racism and resistance. A younger Rishi Sunak flashes up, speaking about his lack of working-class buddies; a person holds up the brick that smashed his face and store home windows in a racist assault. “Among the English hope one positive morning they are going to get up and discover all of them gone,” the archival voice of Mohyeddin says. It’s infuriating, galvanising and overwhelming.
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