Mahtab Hussain’s latest exhibition, What Did You Want to See?, at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, challenges perceptions of visibility, surveillance, and representation within the city’s Muslim community. Moving beyond portraiture, Hussain expands his lens to architecture, documenting 160 mosques across Birmingham in a striking typology that resists categorisation—grand domes, converted houses, repurposed churches—each telling a story of presence and adaptation. Co-commissioned by Photoworks for its 30th anniversary, the exhibition offers an intimate, complex counter-narrative to mainstream portrayals, reclaiming agency and showcasing the resilience, humour, and everyday lives of British Muslims.
Set against Birmingham’s history of surveillance, What Did You Want to See? confronts the impact of being watched and reclaims the right to visibility. Referencing Project Champion—a 2010 counterterrorism initiative that placed CCTV cameras in Muslim neighborhoods—Mahtab Hussain flips the gaze with an immersive installation that shifts power dynamics, inviting viewers to reconsider who gets to look and who is scrutinized. Alongside a striking typology of the city’s mosques, Hussain’s black-and-white portraits of Birmingham residents resist tokenism, capturing their complexity, resilience, and contradictions. In a world of excessive observation and misrepresentation, this exhibition challenges, reclaims, and redefines what it means to be seen.
Gaining trust was integral to What Did You Want to See?, as Hussain navigated the deep-seated mistrust within Muslim communities—an understandable response to years of surveillance and misrepresentation. His process was slow, built on conversation and consent, asking, What does it mean for you to be seen? Revisiting past subjects, he captures figures like Shaf, a tyre shop owner he first photographed years ago, finally creating an image that truly honors him. Throughout the exhibition, acts of resistance emerge—postcode tags scrawled across the gallery walls, once seen as symbols of division, now reclaimed as declarations of presence and pride, asserting visibility in a city that too often marginalizes.
A separate installation, An Act of Civil Declaration (2025), amplifies the voices of Birmingham’s Muslim residents, offering personal responses to the stereotypes imposed upon them. Alongside this, a video collaboration with writer Guy Gunaratne captures everyday Muslim life—social gatherings, sport, and the quiet joys of community—beyond political narratives. To see more about the exhibition visit the Ikon Gallery website here.
British artist Mahtab Hussain (b. 1981) explores identity, heritage, and displacement through long-term research and a visual language that challenges prevailing notions of multiculturalism. He studied at Goldsmiths, City University London, and Nottingham Trent University, supported by an Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) award. Hussain has received numerous accolades, including commissions from Ikon Gallery, New Art Exchange, and Arts Council England, as well as the Light Work + Autograph ABP residency and the 2016 Houston FotoFest Discoveries Award. He has published four artist books, including You Get Me? (MACK), which won the Light Work Photobook Award, and Going Back to Where I Came From (Ikon Gallery).
