Artist Mahtab Hussain was in his 20s in July 2005, when four terrorists detonated homemade bombs in separate, coordinated suicide attacks during rush hour in London. As a young British-born Muslim with Pakistani heritage, Hussain found himself among those on the frontline of a renewed wave of Islamophobia and racial profiling in the UK. The experiences of growing up in the post 9/11, 7/7 era as a young Muslim man instilled in him a hysterical pressure “to change myself”, he says.
Five years later, in 2010, West Midlands police started putting up CCTV cameras across Birmingham – 218 cameras were installed, some of them hidden – most in majority Muslim areas of the city. Project Champion as the surveillance scheme was known, was dismantled a year later, after complaints from the community and an independent review – but the scars remain. Hussain’s exhibition What Did You Want to See? at Ikon is his visceral response to the ignominy of Project Champion, and the catharsis of coming together as a community in its wake.
