Muslims in the West are perpetually summoned to appear: to be counted, included, diversified, made legible. This symposium begins by asking what the demand for representation itself costs. Whether the framing comes from outside or from within, the frameworks through which Muslim experience is rendered visible tend to flatten more than they reveal. The “acceptable” Muslim is curated for comfort; the box is ticked; the image is sanitised; the complexity is lost.

Bringing together artists, curators, and academics working against these conditions, the symposium treats photography as a site of refusal and reimagination, a medium uniquely placed to disrupt commercial templates, social media flatness, and the prescriptive norms that have come to stand in for Muslim life. Authenticity cannot be commissioned or institutionally sanctioned. It emerges from individual experience, lived contradiction, and the artist’s insistence on questioning the very paradigms through which they are asked to be seen.

Event details:

When: Monday 7th September 2026

Time: 1:30 PM - 8 PM  

Where: Oxford House, Derbyshire Street, London, E2 6HG

Ticket price: £11.55 - to purchase tickets here.