Mahtab Hussain: What Did You Want to See?

With portraits of mosques and people at prayer, the British Asian photographer documents the racist stereotyping typically experienced by Muslims across his home city of Birmingham

Birmingham Chapter series, 2024-. Digital C–Type prints. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
20 March – 1 June 2025

by VERONICA SIMPSON

As the 20th century turned into the 21st, Mahtab Hussain (b1981) was in the second year of his history of art BA at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying post-colonial history. While discovering the admirable conversations and provocations around race and identity sparked in the 1980s by Black British activists, artists and intellectuals such as Yinka Shonibare, John Akomfrah and Stuart Hall, he realised that there was a voice missing – that of the British Asian. But he wasn’t yet ready to step up and seize that space as an artist. That moment arrived “only after I started working in museums”, he tells me at the opening of his new show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. “I felt so invisible.” His resolve crystallised around the seeming vilification of all young Muslim men and communities after the London bombings in July 2005.

Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

He chose to express his voice through photography (after doing an MA in photography at Nottingham Trent University), and through a style of formal portraiture that reveals the variety and the humanity of the modern British Asian experience but also converses with the ancient art of portraiture. In Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-Seen, an excellent show at Two Temple Place (until 20 April), three of Hussain’s young men stare calmly at the camera, with all the poise and entitlement of 18th-century aristocrats depicted in front of their stately pile, challenging the viewer to impose those damaging stereotypes. Their confidence, physical strength and self-assertion stand out against the ornate carvings and opulence of this neo-Tudor gothic mansion, built for William Waldorf Astor in the 1890s. But for Hussain’s first solo show at the Ikon Gallery, he is bringing something special for his home town of Birmingham. Born in Glasgow, Hussain was five when his family moved to the city, and the Ikon Gallery is woven into his background: he has enjoyed a 10-year relationship with the gallery, sparked initially by the unstinting support of Jonathan Watkins, its director from 1999 to 2022.

Birmingham Chapter series, 2024-. Digital C–Type prints. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

With his portraits winning an international following and now collected across Europe and the US, Hussain says: “I am at the stage where I feel like I’ve managed to do what I needed to do in terms of trying to have a conversation around the Muslim experience in Britain. I deliberately kept to a very rigid formula, in the way I kept to portraiture and series – both here and in America – because I wanted to position the community in the discipline of portraiture, not documentary. And now I feel that space has opened up, the conversation has matured, and … each piece becomes its own individual conversation, whereas everything else I’ve done before was a collective conversation.”

Mosque City: Birmingham’s Spiritual Landscape, 2023-25. Digital C–Type prints. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

How has Hussain established new conversations here? In four discrete spaces, he unveils his themes. In the first room, one wall is filled by Mosque City: Birmingham’s Spiritual Landscape (2023-25): a 16 x 10 grid of 160 of Birmingham’s mosques, which he photographed during the summers of 2023 and 2024, to capture their mind-boggling diversity and variety – some of the mosques clearly occupy former pubs. This series was conceived apparently in homage to German artists Hilla and Bernd Becher.

Detail of Mosque City: Birmingham’s Spiritual Landscape, 2023-25. Digital C–Type prints. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

About the origins of this work, he says: “I asked myself a few years ago, if I was never to make work again in Birmingham, what would I need to do to feel I’ve closed that chapter? It was really important to me to feel that I’d archived the mosques. Archives are really political, if you look at who gets archived, what gets archived. And by making that work I just realised it’s quite a metaphor for Birmingham. It’s had a very messy identity. It doesn’t know who it is. It’s still feels young in the sense that it’s maturing. The mosques reflect the idea that the city is full of makers.” To make this series, he had to let go of the need to control the image. “I was worried at first – I guess I’m quite a perfectionist. I really want each image I make to be beautiful, whereas I had to let the city tell me how to make this work. So, there’s cars in front of the mosques, there’s shadows. It’s flat in others. There are bollards, and I need to show the realness of it, the urban everydayness. That’s part of what makes it a living, breathing space. It’s alive. It’s not dead.”

Next to it is a landscape photograph of people at massed prayer – the inspiration for which, says Hussain, includes the photographer Simon Roberts. Called A Moment of Unity: Eid Prayer at Small Heath Park, Birmingham (2017), apparently this annual gathering, of between 60,000 and 100,000 people, is the biggest Muslim prayer meeting in Europe.

The images in this room, though, are also from a body of work triggered by a UK government decision in 2010 to increase the number of CCTV cameras in areas where Muslim families and communities were concentrated. Across Birmingham, 218 cameras were installed. Some were hidden, but many stared directly into people’s living rooms. Project Champion, as the scheme was euphemistically called, was halted within a year, after locals complained. But the scars remain.

There is a portrait here of a young man sitting in his car – the image cropped so you only see what is framed by the driver’s window, a chin and an arm relaxing along the car’s sleek bodywork. Hussain says of Car Drivers Were Monitored Via ANPR Camera (2010): “It was initially a much larger image, where you could see the whole sitter, but because of this idea that we all become kind of anonymous when our data is collected through automatic number plate recognition, that’s what I wanted to nudge on.”

Neighbourhood Watched, 2025. Digital C–Type print. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

The photograph beside it is quite a departure from anything Hussain has done before: a family is standing at night around their car with all its lights on, outside a suburban home. At first, I wondered if some alien invasion was meant to be in play – which in some ways it is. It is an Asian family responding to the invasion of CCTV cameras in their neighbourhood. Called Neighbourhood Watched, this is a new piece for the show, with Hussain taking inspiration from the “eerie, filmic” work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson. Hussain worked with students from the University of Wolverhampton, and with the support of the Freelands Foundation, to create this arresting, painterly scene. He says: “How do you tell the story of a family first discovering these cameras right outside their homes – literally facing into their bedroom windows. I wanted to create that moment where there’s discovery, eeriness. Fear … That dark sense of infringement in your home.”

CCTV Camera, 2024. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

Between the car photo and this house, a CCTV camera protrudes into the room – though I didn’t notice it at the time. I only spotted it when I looked more closely at the installation photographs. But it’s part of the works: listed on the gallery map as CCTV Camera (2024).

Here is the Brick, 2025. Video, colour, sound, 13:39 mins. Mahtab Hussain with Guy Gunaratne. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

There is a film in an adjacent viewing room, Here Is the Brick (2025), in which Hussain, together with his friend and film-maker Guy Gunaratne, have tried to replicate what it was like to grow up feeling Asian and othered. There is a grainy, home-video quality to the footage, which includes some genuine home video of the Hussain family, at play. He and Gunaratne “scraped the internet” to find moments that he remembers as seminal in this sense of othering. There are some tasteless pub jokes, clips from films that Hussain feels present “people with dark skins as evil”, including Back to the Future, Aladdin and American Sniper; and a football crowd singing a chant relating to Mo Salah, the Egyptian footballer who plays for Liverpool: “If he scores another few, I’ll be a Muslim too.” The film is filled with humour, brutality and racism made “ordinary” by its ubiquity. There are also fragments of the surreal – the British Asian former prime minister Rishi Sunak talking about not having any working-class friends (no surprise there). At one point, a man holds up the brick that has smashed in his shop window, declaring “here is the brick”, after some local anti-Muslim riots (thus giving the film its title).

Screening Room. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

The narrative in this screening room is reinforced by some striking posters Hussain has made – a Jenny Holzer moment, perhaps – declaring in bold black on white: I am NOT a terrorist; I am NOT a radical. I am NOT a fanatic.

Thus attuned to the injustice of systemic racist stereotyping – or, as Hussain puts it: “the pressure, the hysteria we have experienced as a community” – we are ushered into the next room, which is all calmness and light: a prayer room laid out with prayer mats, the necessary ritual elements, including the Qur’an, and with the nearby doorway into the last gallery framed by elaborate Arabic screens. Hussain tells me he reconnected with his Muslim faith on recent trips to the US. “It was New York City that made me reconnect to my faith. I connected with the LGBTQ community there. I had (previously) thought I’m never going to be part of the Muslim experience. But the LGBTQ community was saying: ‘No, this is a journey. Your journey is with God, not with the people around you.’ I thought if this community – with LGBTQ identities so forbidden in Islam – can be so open to it, then maybe I can. I went to Los Angeles and met amazing cultural makers who are challenging the narratives. They showed me what Islam is doing for the community. It really brings people together.”

Prayer Room. Installation view, Mahtab Hussain, What Did You Want To See? Ikon Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy Ikon. Photo: David Rowan.

So, in this room, Hussain is bringing something of that welcome, that grace and openness. He is the one on the screen in the corner, taking us through the traditional prayers. He says he hopes people will come and use this room for prayer.

Which brings us neatly to the final room, the most “chapel-like” of Ikon’s spaces in this top floor gallery, with its arched, timber ceiling and lofty windows gazing down on Birmingham’s eclectic and chaotic cityscape. Here, we return to his first love: portraits. He presents us with a series of classic black-and-white portraits of British Asian people, but this time all taken in Birmingham. Old and young, male and female, represented in poses that seem as if they are enjoying being “seen” – fully and freely celebrated by the portraitist.

The whole show feels like a moving and beautifully conceived immersion into the British Muslim experience, that sense of not just being permanently othered, but also perennially under suspicion.

• Some works in this show were commissioned as part of Photoworks 30th birthday programme.