Western views, Eastern eyes: Lensman Marwan Bassiouni soon at Lawrie Shabibi
- Last updated: August 3, 2025 | 10:51
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Lawrie Shabibi is presenting New Western Views (Preview), the first solo exhibition in the region of Marwan Bassiouni, opening September 18. 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.
The works reframe landscape photography through the lens of Muslim presence in the contemporary West. Each image centres on a window — an aperture into the outside world, so to say, only rarely found in purpose-built mosques. Through the portals, one can glimpse familiar Western landscapes: traffic junctions, supermarkets, apartment blocks and sports fields, among others.
But the views are not neutral. They are framed by interiors shaped by Islamic visual culture such as patterned tiles, rugs, wooden minbars, and other architectural elements drawn from the diverse communities constructing mosques in the West.
Originating from places such as Bosnia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Morocco, and Indonesia, these communities sometimes also transform everyday suburban spaces into makeshift prayer rooms. The result is distinctly Western scenes, viewed through distinctly Islamic frames.
The works on view are large in scale, 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 inside a single frame. The careful calibration helps preserve architectural and atmospheric detail, resulting in compositions that are immersive. The photographs are not contrasts for their own sake. They project a visual and cultural life shaped by migration, adaptation, and inherited memory. Many of the mosques occupy anonymous or repurposed structures, often former shops, garages, or residential units, revealing how Muslim communities, particularly of the second and third-generations, have embedded their practices in the anonymous spaces of everyday Western life.
The decorative elements often appear provisional, improvised, or partial, and are far from the monumental forms of classical Islamic architecture. But they are no less resonant for this. It is architecture not 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 a backdrop for conquest, curiosity, romanticisation or exotification: it is simply what exists outside a mosque window. Thus the work avoids the familiar tropes of both victimhood and spectacle. It does not ask for empathy, nor does it offer a critique in the conventional sense. It only operates through presence, through the simple but loaded act of looking out.
The photographs are composed with precision, but they are not artificial. Natural light, careful exposure, and a documentary sensibility, allow each interior and exterior to coexist without jarring. 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. It invites viewers to consider who gets to define the visual language of a place, and how diasporic identities are expressed not through spectacle alone, but also through the quiet architecture of daily life. It is not about visibility imposed from outside, but self-definition from within.
Marwan Bassiouni (b. 1985, Morges, Switzerland) is a Swiss-Egyptian-American artist and photographer, currently based in the Netherlands. His work explores the intersection of Islamic identity and Western culture, often through contemplative, large-scale photographic installations. He holds a BA in photography from The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) and a photographer CFC from the Photography School of Vevey (CEPV). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Photography Museum of The Hague, Netherlands (2019); Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (2023); International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2024); Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Switzerland (2019); Museum Schloss Moyland, Germany (2023); Shanghai Center of Photography, China (2022); Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2019); Festival Circulation(s), Paris, France (2020) and Z33, Hasselt, Belgium (2022), among others.
Bassiouni’s work is included in international private and permanent collections of institutions such as the Kunsthaus of Zurich (Switzerland), Kunstmuseum Bern (Switzerland), the Netherlands Photo Museum, Kunstmuseum Den Haag (Netherlands) and the International Center of Photography in New York (USA). He is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Student Grant, the Harry Pennings Prize, the Prix Circulation(s)-Fujifilm and several other awards and nominations. His book, New Dutch Views, was a finalist for the Aperture First Book Award at Paris Photo. Since 2020, his work has been supported by the Mondriaan Funds and awarded grants from the Mondriaan Funds in 2020, 2022 and 2024.
Lawrie Shabibi is a contemporary art gallery housed in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. It supports the long-term development of the careers of young international contemporary artists, with a focus on those from the Middle East and North Africa. The gallery also organises art historical exhibitions working with an older generation of artists from the region. Liaising with curators, institutions, museums and collectors, the gallery has successfully introduced international artists to the region, at the same time presenting Middle Eastern artists to the international contemporary art community. By holding a regular programme of exhibitions, screenings and talks, publishing catalogues and participating in international art fairs, Lawrie Shabibi has been a forerunner in the development of the contemporary art scene in Dubai.