Three British Mosques
La Biennale di Venezia
2021

For the 2021 Venice Biennale, Shahed co-curated the V&A Pavilion with Christopher Turner and Ella Kilgallon.

The exhibition, titled Three British Mosques, told the story of the architecture of the adapted mosque through three examples. Each of the mosques represented a different aspect of the mosque’s ar- chitectural journey, however they had all been created through the re-use and adaptation of existing buildings.

The story being told was of 1st generation migrant communities, in this case those originating from Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the way in which they had fashioned their community and reli- gious spaces by self-funding and self-designing them.

These buildings were established from the 1970s to the 1990s, and they represent a period of mosque architecture when postcolonial migrants were creating new religious spaces for the first time in the post-war period.

The exhibition recreated replicas of parts of these mosques in exact detail, so the audience could physically experience this self- built architecture. Interviews with mosque attendees were shown on screens to provide lived experiences of the buildings.

This adapted and community-built architecture shows how people can be deeply invested in the creation of their collective spaces. They also show how a new visual language emerges in architec- ture where people have agency in shaping their own environments. The exhibition is an exploration and celebration of this process.

Through the construction of the mosque replicas, the exhibition explores ways of engaging diverse audiences with the history of the mosque and Muslim communities in Britain in an experiential and uncomplicated way. It provides a way in for an international audience to a subject that might otherwise seem inaccessible and unknown.