When Aziza Zahran looks at the photos in ArtRage’s latest exhibition Muslims in America: Syracuse Edition, she sees her own tight-knit community with its diverse cultural backgrounds.
Zahran, who is Palestinian, said the gallery helps give Muslim-Americans in Syracuse a voice.
”Right now Palestinian voices are being silenced on every level,” Zahran said. “And, when you’re given a voice like this, it sends a message out to the world to pay attention.”
Zahran’s portrait and those of other Muslim-Americans from Syracuse presented in the exhibition are part of an effort by photographer Mahtab Hussain to document the Muslim experience in the United States and England.
For more than a decade, Hussain, who is from England, has crafted street portrait style to convey images of misrepresented and stereotyped groups. His latest work, encompassing 190 portraits, examines the Muslim experience across North America.
“Muslims in America: Syracuse Edition” showcases 31 portraits taken by Hussain of members of Syracuse’s Muslim community. The exhibition is on display at ArtRage Gallery through March 16. His collection has been showcased in galleries throughout North America, including Syracuse, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Toronto, Canada.
“I’m Muslim. This is very much the reason why I want to make this work. I want to challenge what it means to be Muslim, today,” Hussain said. “I dedicate a big chunk of my life to it, I’m sure it’s going to be a lifelong cause.”
Hussain’s work highlights a range of black and brown experiences in Britain and North America.
In his personal life, Hussain has used his artistry to explore the complex ideas of identity.
His work draws from his personal experiences being raised Muslim and British-Pakistani in Birmingham. Hussain wanted to demonstrate to the world what these identities meant to different people.
Following the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, during Hussain’s time as an undergraduate student at the University of London’s Goldsmith College, xenophobia heightened and misinformation spread about Muslim communities.
After graduating, Hussain worked at the National Portrait Gallery. He was dismayed by the lack of representation and conversations about artists presenting authentic Muslim stories.
This moved him to create his first series of street portraits, You Get Me? It showcased the multifaceted layers of South Asian men in Birmingham that Hussain had not seen reflected in art galleries, he said.
The series centralized the stories of Briminghan’s South Asian male community through various lenses: religion, pop culture, style, urbanism, and hyper-masculinity. The portraiture took three years to complete.
“I really wanted to start to understand why is it that the South Asian males were positioning themselves as this kind of alpha male person?” Hussain said. “At the time the press were really preying around these narratives of violent Asian men, being terrorists, going on the pursuit of Jihad.”
His work juxtaposed South Asian men holding onto traditional culture norms while also conforming to Western culture.
Throughout the years, Hussain’s portrait series evolved and presented more marginalized groups. In the years following his first street portrait series, he created others.
One, “Honest With You,” explored the identities of Muslim women beyond stereotypes. Another, “Going Back Home To Where I Came From?” explored his own connection with Pakistan. He returned to the South Asian country and visited the village where his mother grew up.
Hussain photographed relatives, community members, homes and the streets to showcase the life of Pakistani people.
“I’m really trying to position beautiful black and brown skin as worthy enough to grace museums and gallery halls,” Hussain said.
His current art exhibition is reminiscent of his early style of street portraits.
Last October, Hussain visited Syracuse to kickstart his two week project. Hussain engaged with and photographed Muslim community members.
Rayan Mohamed, who identifies as a hijabi, was connected to Hussain through one of her professors at Syracuse University’s writing program.
Mohamed is currently studying film at Syracuse University, with a goal to create films highlighting marginalized stories, something she believes is missing in mainstream media right now.
“To have my portrait in the world talking about my Muslim experience, I feel like that’s a win-win,” Mohamed said.
In the exhibition, each subject holds their own story of told and untold life experiences. Some of the subjects stare into the lens and others divert their faces away from the camera, revealing their side profiles.
“It’s all about trying to visually articulate and share the complex stories, and also bridging histories and allowing more nuanced conversations to take place,” Hussain said.
Through his work, Hussain aims to encourage viewers to interpret, question, and consider thinking deeper beyond what they see, especially with regard to misrepresented communities.
Each portrait tells a different story about the Muslim community members from different parts of the globe, Hussain said. The subjects of the photographs hail from Ethiopia, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan, and Somalia. But they all now call Syracuse their home.
“I’ve never really seen work of myself in spaces like this and so it’s really a wonderful opportunity to be the artist that I am, but then also for others to tell me how important it is to be represented in that way,” Hussain said.
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