UK art show explores Muslim life, Europe’s Islamic history and Islamophobia | Arts and Culture News

London, United Kingdom – Beneath a 536-year-old Islamic-inspired Spanish roof in east London hold three tapestries linking town’s Muslim communities to Europe’s longstanding Muslim histories.

Among the many works by artist Shahed Saleem, indicators from the British Residence Workplace’s 2013 “Hostile Environment” coverage, urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport, are depicted together with pictures of Muslim buyers in London’s various Queen’s Market and a portrait of Altab Ali, a younger Bangladeshi man who was murdered in a metropolis park in a racially motivated assault.

The gathering, entitled I Was Born Right here, is “a narrative of migration and of belonging”, mentioned Saleem, who can also be an architect, writer and tutorial.

Sitting on pillows beneath the ceiling, he invited onlookers to view and focus on his exhibition.

Saleem contextualised the works towards rising xenophobia, seen just lately in the course of the election wins of Reform UK, an anti-immigrant social gathering, and racist riots in Belfast, Northern Eire.

“Whereas I used to be making the work, I used to be seeing the rising racial politics, the hateful local weather towards … principally all those that represented migration and processes of immigration,” Saleem informed Al Jazeera.

‘The themes stay alive’

He was approached by the Victoria and Albert Museum workforce in 2024 to create an exhibit for his or her new Stratford location, the V&A East Storehouse, which responded to the area people and tradition, and to the Torrijos ceiling. The frilly carved and gilded wood ceiling, which measures 6 by 6 metres (20 x 20 ft), originated from a palace within the central Spanish city of Torrijos.

What adopted was a whole lot of hours of constructing three monumental tapestries.

The primary, named Residence Workplace, depicts verbatim quotes from authorities signage displayed via various neighbourhoods in London. Again in 2013, intimidation ways have been evident within the language used: “106 ARRESTS LAST WEEK IN YOUR AREA”, “Within the UK Illegally?” and “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST”. They’re now woven on the material, towards a backdrop of Alhambra patterns – Islamic geometric artwork rooted in medieval Spain.

A panelled tapestry, Altab Ali’s portrait, honours the textile employee who was stabbed to dying in a racially motivated assault in 1978, when he was simply 24.

There may be additionally a picture of the voyage of the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’s automobile, funded by the Spanish monarchy, marking the start of Spain’s colonisation of the so-called “New World” in 1492.

Within the 1400s, regardless of centuries of non secular plurality all through Spain, the Spanish Inquisition started violently focusing on Jewish and Muslim communities.

“Whereas this era is usually celebrated because the daybreak of Spain’s Golden Age, it additionally ushered in one in all Europe’s most devastating programmes of non secular and ethnic homogenisation,” mentioned Tharik Hussain, historian, journey author and writer of Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred 12 months Historical past.

“Over the century that adopted, and in these main as much as it, a whole lot of 1000’s of European Muslims and Jews have been compelled into exile, compelled to transform or pushed from their properties, whereas numerous others endured persecution, imprisonment and dying in an try and erase total communities that had been indigenous to the peninsula for hundreds of years.”

He mentioned all through historical past, “Christian Europe” has admired and at occasions preserved and celebrated the “inventive achievements of Europe’s Islamic civilisation”, however too usually has marginalised, excluded and persecuted Muslim communities.

Reflecting on the exhibit, 26-year-old customer Hana mentioned, “Though the tales have been rooted up to now, you’ll be able to see that the themes stay alive in right this moment’s public.

“There was one thing notably ironic about [the roof] being offered alongside the tapestry’s illustration of hostility and the uncomfortable realities of migration.”

She mentioned the irony is in Europe’s longstanding fascination and orientalisation of Islamic artwork and other people, alongside rising Islamophobia. Up to now 12 months alone, Islamic artwork has offered for record-setting quantities in London’s public sale homes, whereas anti-Muslim crimes terrorise communities.

For Saleem, histories are deliberately interwoven.

“Colonisation overseas and the creation of ethno-nationalism at dwelling, these two elements grew to become constituent elements of the Fashionable European nation, which continues right this moment,” he mentioned.

Elsewhere within the exhibit, The Bell Resort and the Britannia Resort, each of which have been used to host asylum seekers, are depicted on a coat of arms. Final July, a whole lot of far-right protesters tried to storm The Bell Resort in Epping, Essex, at the least three of whom have been discovered responsible of violent dysfunction this month.

One other tapestry is energetic. A crowd of market-goers bustles all through Newham’s Queen’s Market, an iconic publicly owned market that locals have just lately fought to guard towards company growth.

“I felt that these are the people who find themselves being very largely impacted by laws and timing that we’re seeing,” Saleem informed Al Jazeera. “However in addition they characterize a multicultural [Britain] and a means of arriving, settling, creativity, labour and life, actually. This piece exhibits the richness of town which is threatened.”

I used to be born right here: A defensive assertion within the face of hostility

For Imran Haque, 25, the exhibit is extra than simply a creative and political commentary – it speaks to him and his household’s private histories.

“I Was Born Right here manifests the very actual, tangible and trustworthy fact that I, and 1000’s extra British Muslims, have been, actually, born right here,” he informed Al Jazeera. Within the Nineteen Seventies, Haque’s mom and her mates, as younger Bangladeshi newcomers to London, shopped for materials at the exact same market that Saleem sourced his textiles from.

Underpinning Saleem’s work is an undermining of ethnonationalist pondering that positions Muslim immigrants as international and non-British.

The histories of the Alhambra and the roof itself nod to Islam’s place in Europe for hundreds of years, whereas the title of the exhibit, I Was Born Right here, satirises a standard phrase that Muslim and non-white Londoners are sometimes compelled to repeat.

“It’s one thing that we must use to justify our existence right here, in England, to counter racist assaults,” Saleem defined to Al Jazeera. “It’s half [of] a parody of getting to constantly declare one’s area within the palace the place you really belong.”

The works are the very first thing the attention catches when getting into the primary ground of the Storehouse, taking over an infinite quantity of area with its vibrant colors and sheer dimension.

This significance just isn’t misplaced on onlookers like Haque, who mentioned its prominence within the gallery “has allowed me to be happy to occupy area with my historical past and story”.

“Muslims aren’t an odd or international idea,” he mentioned. “The faith has been identified on these shores from the sixteenth century, and the items function a reminder that religion has no borders.”

I Was Born Right here, to Saleem, is not only a political commentary or a collection of artworks – it’s an artefact. “We’re in a historic second at this time limit so the work acts as a marker of that second, as nicely,” says Saleem, viewing the works as documenting an unprecedented wave of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment, and a historic revisionism that positions Europe as solely Christian. “If you come again and browse the work in 100 years’ time, it’s going to communicate of all this stuff.”