Soul City Arts

24/08/2026

Professor Mahmood Mamdani will close Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

It feels particularly significant to have Mamdani as part of this gathering. His landmark book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim gave language to a political framing that continues to shape how Muslim lives are understood, represented and divided into categories of acceptable and unacceptable.

More than twenty years after the book was published, those questions have not disappeared. They sit at the heart of this symposium.

A globally respected scholar in his own right, Mamdani is also the father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, placing this extraordinary family at the centre of some of the most important political and cultural conversations of our time.

After a day of photography, conversation and reflection, Professor Mamdani will join us via video for the closing remarks, returning to the ideas from which the symposium takes its name.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
7 September 2026
Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London

Limited tickets available now. www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.eventbrite.com

19/08/2026

What does it mean to photograph a community that has spent decades being surveilled, ridiculed, and filtered through neo-Orientalist structures? For Muslim lens-based artists, visibility in the West has long carried an excessive price: the enforcement of a “sanitized Muslim” trope that demands both perfection and submission at the expense of complexity.

18/08/2026

Good Muslim - Bad Muslim- the synposium. Founder of Soul City Arts Mohammed Ali speaks about some of the reasons for why the symposium was programmed.

Tickets are selling fast. Register via link bio

14/08/2026

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13/08/2026

Program Spotlight: Ahead of the symposium, practitioners were invited to submit a single anonymous reflection: a tension in their work they haven't resolved, a moment they softened it knowing who might see it. A curated sequence of these becomes 'What We Don't Say' — a closed-door listening circle, part of the day on 7 September.

Presented by Soul City Arts, led by and Academic lead , featuring a selection of panels, spotlights, keynotes and conversations. Curated by Mohamed Somji

📆 Monday, September 7 • 1:00 PM - 8 PM
📍Oxford House, London, England
🎫 Tickets £10 + booking fee - Available in lnk in bio or www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.eventbrite.com

11/08/2026

Programme Spotlight: Who gets commissioned? Who gets funded? Who gets to decide which stories are worth telling?

Commissioning, Curating, Refusing: the work behind the Image brings together practitioners, curators, programmers and producers to look at the decisions that sit behind every image — what gets pitched, what gets edited out, what gets exhibited, and what gets refused.

Featuring Rehan Jamil , Aisha Zia , Asim Rafiqui and Mahtab Hussain , the panel asks what it really takes to make and place work honestly when the institutions, funding structures and gatekeepers around it are part of the conversation too.

Part of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a one-day photography symposium.

7 September | Oxford House, London
Full programme and booking link in bio or www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.eventbrite.com

09/08/2026

Program Spotlight: The Case for Opacity — what if being seen isn’t always the answer?

Photographer and visual artist Shaista Chishty challenges the assumption that greater visibility automatically means greater power. Drawing on her research into photography, surveillance and Islamophobia, she makes the case for the right to opacity — the right to remain unknown, illegible and outside the demand to constantly explain or perform Muslim identity.

Join Shaista as part of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a one-day photography symposium questioning who gets represented, on whose terms and at what cost.

7 September | Oxford House, London
Full programme and booking link in bio or at www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.eventbrite.com

Presented by Soul City Arts, led by and Academic lead , featuring a selection of panels, spotlights, keynotes and conversations. Curated by Mohamed Somji

07/08/2026

Program Spotlight. An in-conversation session with photographer Mahtab Hussain , whose work has spent nearly two decades looking closely at British Muslim life, identity, surveillance and the politics of being seen.

From You Get Me? to What Did You Want To See?, Mahtab has consistently turned the camera back on the systems and assumptions that frame Muslim communities, asking what changes when those being watched begin to watch back.

Join Mahtab in conversation with Mohamed Somji as part of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a one-day photography symposium at Oxford House.

7 September
Oxford House, London
Full details and booking link in bio or at www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.eventbrite.com

05/08/2026

05/08/2026

More spotlight features for the forthcoming Good Muslim, Bad Muslim Symposium.

'Thread and Trace' brings together artists Nilupa Yasmin @ and Miriam Ali , moderated by Dr Fatima Rajina .rajina, for a conversation on lineage, material and self-representation. 7 Sept, Oxford House.