Birmingham Expo to Focus on Architecture of City’s 160 Mosques

IQNA – An exhibition is planned to be held in Birmingham, the UK, focusing on the varied forms of the architecture of the city’s mosques.

The Ikon Gallery is to host What Did You Want to See?, a solo exhibition by British artist Mahtab Hussain, from March 20 to June 1, 2025.

Commissioned by Ikon and Photoworks, the exhibition will examine Birmingham’s built environment, focusing on the city’s mosques and urban spaces while addressing the wider context of surveillance and representation.

A large-scale photographic installation will systematically document 160 mosques across Birmingham. The collection highlights the varied forms of mosque architecture in the city, from Birmingham Central Mosque’s domes and minarets to converted terraced houses and repurposed churches.

Alongside the mosque studies, the exhibition will feature black and white portraits of Birmingham residents taken in 2024, depicting members of the city’s Muslim community in a range of settings.

Part of the exhibition will reference surveillance culture, with an interactive element designed to evoke the experience of being observed.

Other interventions in the gallery space will engage with Birmingham’s urban landscape, including graffiti-style postcode tagging as a marker of community identity and remnants of Project Champion – a controversial 2011 surveillance initiative.

Tarmac patches, left behind where security cameras were removed, will be repurposed as a visual reference to past monitoring of public spaces.

Source: bdonline.co.uk