Issue 46 - Contents

Mahtab Hussain’s major solo exhibition at Ikon confronts the layered realities of community and belonging. Through portraiture, video and images of Birmingham mosques, What Did You Want To See? explores how surveillance cultures including Project Champion – a counterterrorism initiative in which hundreds of covert CCTV and ANPR cameras were installed in two of the city’s predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods – continue to shape the Muslim experience in the UK. The artist discusses the exhibition’s structures and meanings with Anneka French.

From the gritty realism of the miners’ strike and anti-racist protests to the subversive art of staged portraits and image-text works, Tate Britain’s latest show, The 80s: Photographing Britain, attempts to bring to life a decade shaped by Thatcher-era turbulence, revealing the stark divisions within photography throughout the process. Yet, with nearly 350 images from over 70 photographers, Mark Durden asks if Tate Britain has taken on an impossible challenge?

Spread across four floors of a Bristol townhouse, Amak Mahmoodian’s recent One Hundred and Twenty Minutes exhibition transforms the space into a chronotopia, writes Max Houghton – where many times, places and stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere. Fragments of countless lives emerge through photography, sketches and the quiet intimacy of shared dreams, all shaped by Mahmoodian’s 14-year experience of exile – a condition that continues to drive her work. Profoundly reparative, it invites us to see exile not as a marker of difference, but as a shared human experience.

Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget, on view until recently at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, upends traditional norms of photographic representation. Through the abstraction of Black bodies and the evocative power of blur, Niang navigates the boundaries between visibility and opacity, pulling viewers into a dreamlike space where identity is self-imagined, and complexity resists reduction. Drawing on the works of Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Tebogo George Mahashe, and others, Taous Dahmani reflects on her visit to the exhibition.

Mother, Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, presents over 50 works spanning two decades of the artist’s shapeshifting practice. The exhibition at MoMa PS1 brings together photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text – shown together for the first time – to confront colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, changing ecosystems of the Indian subcontinent, and more. Zahra Amiruddin reflects on the fluidity of Hura’s experimental work, where memories, metaphors and histories blend to reveal the complex and multifaceted lives of images.

At Museum Folkwang, GROW IT, SHOW IT! investigates the relationship between hair, identity and gender performance across cultures. Spanning 150 years of photographic history, from Victorian cartes de visite to TikTok screenshots, the exhibition presents hair as both personal expression and a political symbol. Drawing on lived experience and cultural movements – feminism, queer identity, civil rights, and post-colonial struggles – Song Tae Chong charts the shifting significance of hair over the course of time.

Books

1000 Words

Writer Conversations

(Still available)

Features

Photobook Conversations #1 | Hans Gremmen: “Photography is always a reproduction”