At Lawrie Shabibi Gallery in Dubai, the work of Marwan Bassiouni arrives for the first time in the region. The Swiss-Egyptian-American photographer has chosen to portray Islamic identity in the West through quiet yet powerful images. The exhibition New Western Views, on view from 19 September to 5 November 2025, brings together photographs taken between 2018 and 2022 from inside mosques in the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Each image centers on a window, an opening that frames typically Western landscapes - supermarkets, traffic junctions, residential buildings - yet seen from interiors decorated with carpets, tiles and minbars that recall Islamic traditions from Bosnia, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan and other diasporic contexts. The result is a Western landscape viewed through an Islamic frame, a composition that does not dwell on contrast but highlights a cultural layering shaped by migration, adaptation and inherited memory. The mosques photographed by Bassiouni are often spaces adapted from garages, shops or apartments, modest settings that become points of orientation rather than monumental spectacles. It is an intimate and everyday geography that conveys the life of second and third generation Muslim communities. With rigorous formal control, the artist calibrates light and composition to hold together both interior and exterior. The result is immersive imagery, far from neutral documentation, that proposes a new visual grammar of landscape. Bassiouni overturns the Orientalist tradition: the gaze is no longer directed toward a distant, exotic East, but toward the Western world glimpsed from the windows of a mosque. It is an act of presence rather than denunciation, a form of self-definition expressed through the normality of daily life. Born in Morges in 1985 and based in the Netherlands, Bassiouni has exhibited in institutions such as the Photography Museum in The Hague, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Nederlands Fotomuseum and the International Center of Photography in New York. His works are part of permanent collections in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States. With New Western Views, the artist opens in Dubai a critical dialogue on landscape, belonging and the right to define the visual codes of our time.
