2023 programme

In 2023 The Mosaic Rooms, London approaches its fifteenth year of commissioning, presenting, and supporting artists and cultural practitioners from the Arab world and beyond. We take this year to interrogate questions of active solidarity; how we can continue to collaborate, host, and create sustainable support networks that enable critical and creative artistic practices? How can we build a space for learning and interaction which encourages new creative language to be formed to support these aims?  Across this year’s projects we continue our aim to challenge dominant narratives and invite reflection and participation.

As an organisation we strive to inform our work through sharing conversations with those we work with and for. Over the year’s projects we will collaborate with school children and young people; our regular free event series will create a convivial and open space for exchange and experience between all. We will also give time to this through closed working groups held with audiences and peers to collectively imagine and devise new ways of working and supporting the communities we serve.

As part of this programme, we will present three newly commissioned projects featuring work by multiple artists or collectives:

Constellations of Multiple Wishes
February 17–June 4, 2023
A group exhibition reflecting on ideas of cultural solidarity, exchange and resistance proposed by the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s. Co-curated with Bojana Piškur, the exhibition presents archival materials, existing and commissioned works which connect peripheral geographies and entangle time, history, memory and place. Artists include Larry Achiampong, Nika Autor, Alia Farid, KURS, Basim Magdy and The Art of Non-aligned Collection Laboratory featuring Inji Aflatoun and Choukri Mesli.

Tools for Solidarity
June 24–November 5, 2023
RESOLVE Collective will create a new outdoor commission, as part of our annual family play commission. Collaborating with young people from a local youth club and local families through workshops, visitors will be invited to change the installation’s form over the summer through experimental and radical constructive play. RESOLVE Collective will explore what it means to make solidarity “tangible,” providing a platform for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating to help build resilience in communities. As part of the commission research RESOLVE Collective will go to Palestine to connect Tools for Solidarity internationally.

September 7–December 22, 2023
Collaborating with artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, through their project Bilna’es (in the negative), this group exhibition presents newly commissioned work by artists who are forging a new language to think about and with Palestine. Mona Benyamin, Xaytun Ennasr, Dina Mimi and Makimakukk are connected in their individual practices by the way in which they work with and express radical politics, an expression that ranges from the absurd to the poetic. Bilna’es (in the negative), was born out of a need to support Palestinian artists and is developed as a model for generating a stronger sense of artists taking care of each other.
 

Throughout the year our Young Collective will work with participatory collective Febrik on Who Wants to Collaborate? The project asks why and how do we collaborate and for what purposes, how to operate collectively, and who do we invite to work with us?

The programme strand Future Threads will further explore ways of (co)creating sustainable ecologies organising and testing participatory formats, with a focus on climate justice informed by urgent non-Western and ecology related questions.

The gallery welcome space will also present a newly commissioned collection of sensory play-based objects by UK artist Sarah Marsh. Sensing our way aims to encourage and remove boundaries to art spaces and their encounters through sensory exploration and play.

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

For further information, please contact press [​at​] mosaicrooms.org / T + 44(0)20 7370 9990.