A new exhibition of work by Birmingham artist Mahtab Hussain, featuring photographs which celebrate the city’s Muslim community, opens at Ikon Gallery this month. The installation includes portraits of Muslim people and places of worship, but also examines how cameras can be used as tools for surveillance. What’s On spoke to Mahtab to find out more...

This spring, Ikon Gallery welcomes a showcase of photography by British artist Mahtab Hussain. Entitled What Did You Want To See? and including new works which document and celebrate Birmingham’s Muslim community, the show also interrogates how photographic documentation can overlap with surveillance tactics.

While compiling images for the gallery, Mahtab explored the streets of Birmingham, looking for people who might be included in his work.

“If there was anyone that I felt could work for the series - it could be a scarf they're wearing, or how they're holding themselves - I'd approach them,” explains Mahtab. “It was an interesting way of working. I wasn't building a huge archive; I was actually trying to find people who would represent a certain part of the community.

“Everyone is a ‘sitter’ in my work - no one is a subject. I'm very aware of the colonial language of photography - like capture, shoot, expose, subject; these can be very violent words. Everyone that I meet, I always see them as a sitter or an individual. I don't feel like I ‘take’ an image or ‘capture’ - it's about ‘making’. There's always this level of collaboration every time I make new work or portraits.”

The first room of Mahtab’s Ikon installation contains 160 photographs of mosques from across Birmingham. The intention is to celebrate the complex and varied architecture of the city and its relationship with the Muslim community.

“Some are very architecturally designed mosques with minarets that probably cost millions, to ones that are just literally like a shop front, or even a home. That room will have a map of Project Champion - where the cameras were located.”

Project Champion, a widely criticised scheme disbanded in 2011, involved CCTV and automatic number plate recognition cameras being covertly installed by West Midlands Police in Muslim areas of Birmingham. The first gallery space explores the impact that this had on the people who live in those areas. There’s also a film which documents national and global hysterical representation of the Muslim community, which Mahtab describes as “a gut-wrenching archival piece”.

The second room of the gallery provides an intentional contrast with the heavy-hitting themes of the previous room. The final space turns visitors’ attention towards the Muslim community of Birmingham in person, featuring 20 black & white portraits.

“The middle room we're turning into a mosque or a prayer room. There’ll be a prayer carpet on the floor. Through all that intensity, I wanted to go into a space where it's very reflective, beautiful and spiritual, and have a moment to breathe.

“The first room really establishes what this show’s all about and the locality - which is that it's about Birmingham, and particularly about Project Champion. The last room is really this idea of stripping away the environment and celebrating the individual who identifies as being Muslim. These portraits could easily have been made in London, Nottingham or Bradford - it's the same community.”

The style of portraiture that Mahtab employs is heavily influenced by Richard Avedon’s Portraits Of The American West. Avedon’s series, which was compiled between 1979 and 1984, documents working people from across America, photographed against starkly white backgrounds.

“He went out and photographed the working-class experience. That's what I wanted to do in this series. I wanted to do it within the same language as Avedon - to have the next chapter of that conversation. When you strip away the background, it forces you to really see the individual. It forces you to read them through their clothes, their gestures, their eyes, their skin.”

Mahtab grew up in Birmingham (“It definitely made me… I'm definitely a Brummie!”), and this marks his first major solo exhibition in the city - although he’s maintained contact with Ikon since his first opportunity with the gallery in 2012.

“Ikon’s been amazing for me. I've had an over-10-year relationship with them. I've done various off-site projects, curatorial projects… There’s a thriving art scene in Birmingham, but I don't think it suffocates artists in the way that it does in London. There's a really lovely community; there's a friendliness here that I like.”

One of the motifs that has reoccurred in Mahtab’s photography involves documenting postcode tags from different areas of the city, sometimes discovered in secluded places, where few people will ever find them. In bringing these into the gallery - alongside images celebrating the architecture of mosques - Mahtab is questioning traditional ideas of what gets to be seen as ‘art’. And although postcode tags might be construed as territorial, he offers a different interpretation.

“You could read them in another way, which is markings to say ‘We grew up here; this is our city, too.’ Those tags are going to be in the show, in and around the gallery. As you walk in, you get to see one by the reception, or one wrapped around a pole… I love that I made these images years ago and never quite had a moment to share them, and here I am, in this beautiful contemporary gallery, sharing these very rough, very edgy postcode tags - but they have a gentleness about them.

“They look great; they're like paintings in their own right. They look so good in that space. I know when I look at them I'm gonna have this big smile on my face.”

The show brings people and places of Birmingham that have perhaps been under-celebrated into the limelight of a gallery space. In doing so, Mahtab is hoping to provide a thought-provoking perspective and celebrate the city’s Muslim community.

“I just want visitors to leave questioning how they see the world and the people around them. I want them to think about visibility… what it truly means to witness someone, rather than observing them. I hope the show can challenge assumptions and create moments of recognition, and also make people look at Birmingham in a new way. If we can do that, I think that'll be a really lovely thing.”

Mahtab Hussain: What Did You Want To See? shows at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery from Thursday 20 March until Sunday 1 June

By Jessica Clixby