LAST CHANCE Marwan Bassiouni: New Western Views (Preview)

This first solo exhibition in the region for Bassiouni offers a first look at an ongoing international project that reframes landscape photography through the lens of lived Muslim presence in the contemporary West. Each of these photographs – taken from inside mosques across the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK – centres on a window, an aperture on to the outside world that is rarely found in purpose-built mosques. Through them we glimpse familiar Western landscapes: traffic junctions, supermarkets, apartment blocks, sports fields. But these views are framed by examples of Islamic visual culture – patterned tiles, rugs, wooden minbars, and more.

New Western Views is a counterpoint to a long history of Orientalist image-making. Bassiouni’s landscapes are no longer the backdrop for conquest, curiosity, or romanticisation; they are simply what exists outside the mosque window. In doing so, the work avoids the familiar tropes of victimhood or spectacle …