Inside Ibraaz: A New Cultural Space Celebrating the Global Majority
EE72 Contributing Art Editor Dominique Heyse-Moore explores a vibrant new space shaping art and ideas in London
Art has got her act together in London again, not least because of Ibraaz, the newest cultural space in the heart of the city. 93 Mortimer Street in W1 is only a moment from the intensity of Oxford Circus, emphasising an atmosphere of refuge and relief. It is dedicated to ideas from us, the Global Majority.
The commitment to hospitality, respectful dialogue and the best of the visual arts is a brave opening love letter to collective humanity in our desperately divided moment.
Founded by Lina Lazaar, vice-president of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (with offices in Tunis, Paris and now London), from 2011 to 17, Ibraaz was an online visual culture platform focused on the Middle East and North Africa. Its global focus will continue to evolve, grounded within culturally plural and communal North African ways of living and the new London space, which opens on October 15 and offers talks and other programmes.
The historic site has housed a synagogue, a hospital offering electrotherapy and a gentlemen’s arts club. Led by architect-in-residence Sumayya Vally, the six floors will continue to unfold through dialogue and exchange.
IBRAAZ
IBRAAZ
It is already inviting: As you enter from the street to the left, a pink Café-in-Residence OULA by chef Boutheina Ben Salem brings Tunisian ‘matriarchal foodways’ to the West End; to the right a green Bookshop-in-Residence curated by Palestine Festival of Literature and Burley Fisher Books (their main shop in Haggerston, East London) is filled with novels, art books, theory and critical writing, children’s books and cookbooks. The Majlis (assembly space) on the ground floor and Minassa (platform) on the lower ground are beautifully equipped for discussion, performances, and screenings.
The latest iteration of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts is the inaugural exhibition within these, one profoundly rooted in care and radical collective solutions. I was curator of the first parliament made by Mahama in 2019 in Manchester and explore the deep impact on me of his way of working here. It is the ideal gathering place in which to hold the conversations Ibraaz urgently intends. Hammad Nasar, Ibraaz’ director of programmes and content, describes their task as to “expand our collective imaginary of a more hopeful future.”
The library on the second floor is conceived as a live artwork. The vividly titled A Flock of Keen-Eyed and Far Seeing Magpies is the first Library-in-Residence by The Otolith Group. For more than 20 years the Group, founded by artists and filmmakers Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, have been gathering reading material, films, maps, recipes, music, catalogues, and other shining things to fuel their art and thinking “across Pan-African and Pan-Asian horizons.”
I am stunned by the generosity of sharing this rich collection to be explored alone or in collective sessions across the year.
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