The Mosaic Rooms, London presents its annual program 2023.
In 2023, The Mosaic Rooms in London will be celebrating its fifteenth year of commissioning, presenting, and supporting Arab and international artists and cultural practitioners. This year, we will investigate topics of active solidarity, such as how we can continue to collaborate, host, and build long-term support networks for critical and creative artistic practices.
How can we create a space for learning and engagement that supports the formation of new creative languages to support these goals? Throughout the initiatives this year, we will continue to challenge mainstream narratives and urge reflection and engagement.
As an organization, we seek to inform our work by having discussions with and for individuals with whom we work. Throughout the year, we will interact with schoolchildren and young people; our regular free event series will offer a convivial and open space for everybody to exchange and enjoy. We will also devote time to this through closed working groups with audiences and peers, in which we will together create and devise new methods 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 show reflecting on the Non-Aligned Movement’s concepts of cultural unity, interchange, and resistance in the 1960s. The exhibition, co-curated with Bojana Pikur, features archival materials, existing and commissioned works that connect distant geographies and interweave 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
As part of our yearly family play commission, RESOLVE Collective will design a new outdoor commission. Through workshops with young people from a local youth club and local families, visitors will be asked to change the form of the installation over the summer through experimental and radical creative play. RESOLVE Collective will investigate what it means to make solidarity “concrete,” providing a platform for the creation of new knowledge and ideas while working to assist communities build resilience. RESOLVE Collective will travel to Palestine as part of the commission research to connect Tools for Solidarity on a global scale.
September 7–December 22, 2023
This group exhibition presents freshly commissioned work by artists who are building a new vocabulary to think about and with Palestine, in collaboration with artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas through their project Bilna’es (in the negative). Mona Benyamin, Xaytun Ennasr, Dina Mimi, and Makimakukk’s unique practices are linked by the way they deal with and articulate radical politics, which varies from the ludicrous to the poetic. Bilna’es (in the negative) arose from the desire to help Palestinian artists and is being developed as a model for creating a greater sense of artists looking out for one another.
Our Young Collective will collaborate with the participatory collective Febrik on Who Wants to Collaborate? throughout the year. The project examines why and how we collaborate and for what reasons, how we operate as a group, and who we invite to work with us.
Future Threads will further investigate ways of (co)creating sustainable ecologies by organizing and testing participatory forms, with an emphasis on climate justice informed by pressing non-Western and ecological problems.
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.
The Mosaic Rooms
226 Cromwell Road
London SW5 0SW
UK
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
T +44 73709990
[email protected]
