Launch Event: Mahtab Hussain: The Commonality of Strangers

In this ambitious project Mahtab Hussain combines photography and text to explore important relationships between identity, heritage and displacement that result from international migration – the truths of which are rarely revealed in the public realm.

6pm: Exhibition Opening
A complimentary drink and canapés will be served on arrival.
Members of the Roma Community from Hyson Green will perform traditional Roma music and dance throughout the evening.

7pm – 7.45pm: Mahtab Hussain in conversation with Sue Steward
Artist Mahtab Hussain will join Sue Steward, writer, broadcaster and photo-editor working in Photography, Visual Arts and World Music, for a detailed conversation about this new collection and the important questions it provokes.

7.45pm – 9pm: Launch event continues.

To RSVP contact [email protected] or call 0115 924 8630.

Find out more about the exhibition.

We look forward to welcoming you to view this poignant new body of work on Friday 30 January from 6pm.

Admission: FREE
Age range: All are welcome

To register for this event, please follow the ‘book this’ link below

Mahtab Hussain

British social commentary artist, Mahtab Hussain (b. 1981), uses photography to explore the important relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. His themes have developed through long-term photographic research and been articulated into a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism.

While seeing his practice as an exchange between the artist and sitter, Hussain believes in placing considerable emphasis on the empowerment of the sitter, and in doing so, creates portraits that force a vital interaction between sitter and viewer.

Mahtab Hussain has been recipient of numerous awards and commissions including, Arts Council England; Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC); he was winner of the Curators Choice Award, Culture Cloud at New Art Exchange, Nottingham and of Format 13 Portfolio Review Award for most significant review.

Sue Steward

Sue Steward is a writer, broadcaster and photography curator and a specialist in World Music. Photography critic for London’s Evening Standard, she writes for many magazines including BJP, PhotoMonitor and Next Level, and book essays for Prix Pictet Awards, Dutch photographers Scarlett Hooft Graafland and Suzanne Jongmanns. Her regular BBC radio programmes have gone sideways and now include Monocle magazine’s MonocleFM.

Sue has been an active trustee with the PhotoVoice charity, setting up charity auctions and events. She is a long-term member of Derby’s photo biennial, FORMAT and will be curator of an exhibition about the history of police Mug Shots.

In her many roles for the World Photography Organization as a judge, curator, adviser and writer for the Magazine, she is will be judging the Awards this month. Other judging include the National Portrait Gallery Portrait Photography Prize, festivals in Derby, Belfast, Arles, Madrid and the architectural photographers for CIOB (Chartered Institute of Builders).

Mentoring emerging photographers has been included in Muscat, Oman, Brighton’s Tripod, and London LCC, and also include talks and lectures. Her curated exhibitions include “Between Two Worlds: A Window on Contemporary Photography from Latin America” (Edel Assanti), London Art Fair’s Photo50, “The New Alchemists: Contemporary Photographers Transcending the Print” (a forthcoming book) and PINTA: Latin American Art Fair 2014.