Exhibitions in 2019

The Mosaic Rooms, London, announces its exhibition programme for 2019. It features four exhibitions; When Legacies Become Debts curated by Azar Mahmoudian, New Waves: Mohammed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School curated by Morad Montazami, RAW QUEENS curated by Yasmina Naji, Kulte Gallery, and a solo exhibition by artist Praneet Soi.

When Legacies Become Debts
January 18–March 30
Opening: Thursday, January 17, 6:30–8:30pm

When Legacies Become Debts contemplates the personal and collective forms of reliance and liability experienced between different generations of artists and writers in the Iranian context. The exhibiton features commissioned works by Ali Meer Azimi, Bahar Noorizadeh and Mahan Moalemi, recent projects by Hadi Fallahpisheh and Shirin Sabahi, and in-process researches by Hannah Darabi, Ronak Moshtaghi, and Hamed Yousefi (with Ali Mirsepassi). Curated by Azar Mahmoudian, the exhibition and related programme addresses the nuances of artistic research and production as part of series of pedagogical, discursive and material negotiations with the legacies that shape and inform them. 

When Legacies Become Debts centres on intergenerational obligations, personal commitments, intellectual inheritances and volatile destinies. What can be done with legacies handed down from the immediate, previous generation? Legacies that are desired or unwanted, reassuring or questionable? Legacies of imagined futures that have taken a detour? Turning the notion of inheritance on its head, the exhibition suggests an inward excavation that asks how one might inherit oneself. In this respect, it addresses the feeling of indebtedness that legacies impart upon subsequent generations in posterity. With this relationship comes a need to pay back, an expectation to continue what those legacies have triggered and provoked in their wake. Indebtedness gradually becomes abstract in time and takes mental and emotional form. The question remains: what are the generative or prospective dimensions of such a form beyond the impositions by the current state of the economy in the art-world and beyond? Can indebtedness not only be associated with guilt and fear (and at the other end of the spectrum, optimistically, with love and care), but instead with an indefinable driving force for carrying on? A sense of commitment to a certain continuum? How irreparable is the debt, and how irrecoverable are the bonds?

The exhibition hosts a series of conversations which will unfold in the exhibition space over the course of ten weeks. Contributors to the conversation series include Heytham Al-Wardani, Catherine David, Sumaya Kassamali, Sami Khatib, Hamed Khosravi, Suhail Malik, Lucie Mercier, Khashayar Naderehvandi, Alphabet Collection (Mo Salemi and Patrick Schabus) Sam Samiee, Ashkan Sepahvand, Mamali Shafahi, Jan Verwoert and the artists contributed to the show. A structure is borrowed from Dora Garcia's Red Love, and Ghazaal Vojdani of Studio EUROPIUM has responded to the exhibition with design interventions. The exhibition is the fourth in The Mosaic Rooms’ tenth anniversary series.

New Waves: Mohammed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School
April 12–June 22 
Opening: Thursday, April 11, 6:30–8:30pm

The Mosaic Rooms present works by the abstract painter Mohammed Melehi (b. 1936) and related archives from the Casablanca Art School where he was a key member and activist in the 1960s and 70s. Melehi’s own work results from a dialogue between Moroccan traditional and popular craft, whilst also connecting to the hard edge painters of the 1960’s. His multiple and overflowing variations on the motif of the “wave” suggests new possibilities for a transnational modernism. This exhibition also presents his contribution as a graphic designer and urban designer. It is the final exhibition in a special three exhibition series of modernists from the Arab world and Iran, curated by Morad Montazami. 

RAW QUEENS
July 5–September 14
Opening: Thursday, July 4, 6:30–8:30pm

This summer The Mosaic Rooms collaborates with Morocco-based Kulte Gallery for RAW QUEENS, a group exhibition curated by Yasmina Naji. The exhibition explores art, feminism and decolonisation and features work by artists including Fatima Mazmouz and Meriem Bennani. RAW QUEENS is the fourth in The Mosaic Rooms’ tenth anniversary series featuring modernist and contemporary artists from Egypt, Iran and Morocco. The exhibition is part of Shubbak Festival 2019. 

Praneet Soi - Solo Exhibition
September 27–December 7
Opening: Thursday, September 26, 6:30–8:30pm

This will be the first solo exhibition in a London institution by the Amsterdam based Indian artist Praneet Soi. Soi has been commissioned to create a body of work around his upcoming stay in the West Bank, Palestine. As a painter, Soi has been exploring techniques, such as silverpoint and anamorphosis, developed from his use of photographic and archival imagery. His recent audio-visual installations implement a cut and paste aesthetic to generate a textured, polyphonic narrative. His upcoming commission for The Mosaic Rooms will expand on this work. It will be accompanied by an exploration of archival documents including the Minto Album, a Mughal album stored in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and the Victoria and Albert museum, London, in which a heterogeneous stylistic approach is used to conjure representations of power. A monograph will be released as a part of this commission.

About The Mosaic Rooms
The Mosaic Rooms is London's free space for contemporary culture from the Arab world and beyond. All exhibitions and the majority of their events are free. They are a project of the A.M. Qattan Foundation, a UK registered charity number 1029450.

For further information please contact:
Flora Bain at The Mosaic Rooms press@mosaicrooms.org or T 020 7370 9990