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

THE Mosaic Rooms, a non-profit space dedicated to Arabic culture, has announced a major restructuring and expansion of its premises in West London.

“We are working on an external and internal reorganization”, says the site’s director, Rachael Jarvis. “We are remodeling the galleries to reflect how they can be best used, and we are reincorporating ourselves as an independent non-profit organization in order to have our own board and diversified income sources.”

Mosaic Rooms is currently funded by the AM Qattan Foundation, an organization based in the United Kingdom and Ramallah which supports culture and education in Palestine and the Arab world. The Qattan Foundation will continue to support Mosaic Rooms and its mission will remain the same, but the change aims to provide greater financial stability and independent standing to the organization.

Ideally, says Omar Qattan, president of the foundation, the Mosaic Rooms will become a “publicly supported and democratically run institution specializing in the (Arab) region.”

The gallery is expected to add a dedicated space for its creative learning series, an events room, a work-in-progress space and recording studios for a new podcast series. The organization is also planning a series of micro-commissions of already exhibited artists that will be exhibited in the new spaces, in order to recognize the programming to date. The capital project is expected to be completed in late fall next year.

Changing contexts

Since Mosaic Rooms opened in 2008, it has been a consistent platform in the UK for major artists from across the Arab region, such as Heba Amin, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and Mohammed Omar Khalil. Its audience has expanded over the years, reflecting changing attitudes towards Arab culture and growing curiosity for 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 with Afghanistan, and… the notion of Arab culture was attacked, both by the right and also by Islamic ideology. All of our beautiful, varied and different cultures have been simplified and distilled into a meaningless thing called Islamic civilization.”

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

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

“We’ve been able to act as a safe space where people can come together to ask questions,” she says. “Even the bookstore grew. We have people coming into the bookstore saying, ‘I want to learn more.’ It became a place of inquiry as much as a place to buy books.”

The change in funding structure has been under discussion for some time, says Qattan, and is not a direct response to the war in Gaza, although it is undeniable that the organization faces financial pressures. Its main headquarters in Gaza, which was formerly a children’s library, is still standing but is now used as a shelter – at one point housing around 4,000 people. The foundation still pays its staff, who continue their work with children and teachers whenever possible, although four have left the country and two have been killed.

Qattan says the Foundation will play a role in rebuilding Gaza, but it is unclear exactly how. “The worst thing we face, besides human suffering and misery, is uncertainty about the future,” he says. “People are very tense and the language used by the Israeli leadership has been so cataclysmic that people are taking it seriously…it has made it very difficult to think lucidly about the future.”