amid war in Gaza, London’s Mosaic Rooms announces major expansion plans

The Mosaic Rooms, a non-profit space dedicated to Arab culture, has announced a major restructure and expansion of its west London site.

“We are working on a reorganisation both externally and internally,” says the site’s director, Rachael Jarvis. “We are refurbishing the galleries to reflect how they can be better used, and we are reincorporating as an independent non-profit, in order to have our own board and a diverse income streams.”

The Mosaic Rooms is currently funded by the A. M. Qattan Foundation, a UK and Ramallah-based organisation that supports culture and education in Palestine and the Arab world. The Qattan Foundation will continue to support the Mosaic Rooms and its remit will remain the same, but the move is intended to give further financial stability and independent standing to the organisation.

Ideally, says Omar Qattan, chair of the foundation, the Mosaic Rooms will become a “publicly supported, democratically run institution that is specialised in the [Arab] region”.

The gallery is due to add a dedicated space for its creative learning series, an event room, a work in progress space, and recording studios for a new podcast series. The organisation is also planning a series of micro-commissions from previously shown artists that will be displayed around the new spaces, in order to acknowledge the programme so far. The capital project is expected to be completed by late autumn next year.

Changing contexts

Since the Mosaic Rooms opened in 2008 it has been a consistent platform in the UK for major artists from the wider Arab region, such as Heba Amin, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and Mohammed Omar Khalil. Its audience has expanded over the years, reflecting shifting attitudes towards Arab culture and growing curiosity around art from the Global South.

“When we started, the context was very different,” says Qattan. “We had come out of decades of war with Iraq, and before that Afghanistan, and… the notion of Arab culture had gotten a battering, both from the right but also from Islamist ideology. All our beautiful and varied and different cultures were simplified and distilled into one meaningless thing called Islamic civilization.”

Qattan’s idea for the foundation was initially multi-disciplinary, but it has focused more on visual arts, with other programming strands responding to shifts in the art world such as greater consideration of ecological practices.

Over the past year the Mosaic Rooms has been a vocal supporter of a ceasefire in Gaza. Because of its stated mandate to educate the public about Palestine and the Arab world, it has been able to be more direct in taking a public stance. The gallery has accommodated many artists and art professionals who feel silenced elsewhere, says Jarvis, and helped to create connections and community for people who want to better understand the current conflict.

“We have been able to act as a safe space where people can come together to ask questions,” she says. “Even the bookshop has grown. We have people coming into the bookshop saying, ‘I want to learn more’. It’s become a place of questioning, as much as a place to buy books.”

The change in funding structure has been under discussion for a while, says Qattan, and is not directly in response to the war in Gaza, though it is undeniable that the organisation faces financial pressures. Their main site in Gaza, which was formerly a children’s library, is still standing but is now being used as a shelter—at one point, housing around 4,000 people. The foundation is still paying their staff, who continue their work with children and teachers whenever possible, though four have left the country and two have been killed.

Qattan says that the Foundation will play a part in the rebuilding of Gaza, but exactly how is unclear. “The worst thing that we’re facing, apart from the human suffering and destitution, is the uncertainty about the future,” he says. “People are very tense, and the language that has been used by the Israeli leadership has been so cataclysmic that people are taking them seriously… it’s made it very difficult to think lucidly about the future.”