DUBAI.- Lawrie Shabibi is presenting New Western Views (Preview), the first solo exhibition in the region by Marwan Bassiouni. Featuring photographs taken between 2018 and 2022 from inside mosques across the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, the exhibition offers a first look at Bassiouni’s ongoing international project. These works reframe landscape photography through the lens of lived Muslim presence in the contemporary West.
Each image centres on a window—an aperture onto the outside world, rarely found in purpose-built mosques. Through these portals, we glimpse familiar Western landscapes: traffic junctions, supermarkets, apartment blocks, sports fields. But these views are not neutral. They are framed by interiors shaped by Islamic visual culture: patterned tiles, rugs, wooden minbars, and other architectural elements drawn from the diverse communities building mosques across the West. Originating from places such as Bosnia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Morocco, and Indonesia, these communities transform everyday suburban spaces into makeshift prayer rooms. The result is a distinctly Western scene viewed through a distinctly Islamic frame.
The works on view are large in scale, and composed with a deliberate attention to balance and spatial clarity. While photographic in medium, they depart from traditional documentary approaches. Each image is constructed with precise control over lighting, capturing both interior and exterior spaces within a single frame. This careful calibration preserves architectural and atmospheric detail, resulting in compositions that are immersive rather than descriptive.
These photographs are not about contrast for its own sake. They expose a visual and cultural layering shaped by migration, adaptation, and inherited memory. Many of these mosques occupy anonymous or repurposed structures, former shops, garages, or residential units, revealing how Muslim communities, particularly second and third-generation, have embedded their practices into the overlooked spaces of everyday life. The decorative elements often appear provisional, improvised, or partial, far from the monumental forms of classical Islamic architecture, yet no less resonant. This is not architecture as spectacle, but as orientation.
New Western Views pushes back against the long history of Orientalist image making, which has traditionally cast the Islamic world as distant, exotic, and other. Here, Bassiouni reverses that gaze. The landscape is no longer the backdrop for conquest, curiosity, or romanticisation, it is simply what exists outside the mosque window. In doing so, the work avoids the familiar tropes of both victimhood and spectacle. It doesn’t ask for empathy, nor does it offer critique in the conventional sense. It operates through presence, through the simple but loaded act of looking out.
The photographs are composed with precision but not artificiality. Natural light, careful exposure, and a documentary sensibility allow each interior and exterior to coexist without collapse. The result is not a blending of worlds, but a visual articulation of how they are held together, sometimes comfortably, sometimes awkwardly, but always on their own terms.
New Western Views opens up a critical space within both landscape photography and contemporary art more broadly. It invites viewers to consider who gets to define the visual language of place, and how diasporic identities are expressed not through performance, but through the quiet architecture of daily life. This is not about visibility imposed from outside, but self-definition from within.
