Counter-Archive: Subverting Monstrous Representation
Courtesy of Mahtab Hussain
Counter-Archive: Subverting Monstrous Representation
A conversation between Hussain & Gunaratne
The central question: When the dominant culture has already made a monster of you – in sitcoms, tabloids, political speeches, CCTV grids – what does it mean to take that monster apart, piece by piece, in public?
Here Is the Brick is an act of excavation: pulling the archive of anti-Muslim representation out of the cultural unconscious and forcing it into the light. Comedy sketches that got laughs. News footage that manufactured fear. Politicians who built careers on fear and racism. The film holds the material within context and builds toward something new.
The conversation would explore what it takes aesthetically, psychologically and politically to work inside illegitimate representation without being consumed by it. How does an artist handle such incendiary material? What is the artist’s responsibility to the people whose image has been weaponised? How does beauty, in both the formal care of Mahtab’s portraiture, the precision of Guy’s archive work and filmmaking, become an act of refusal?
Here is the Brick works in the same lineage as Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death and Derek Jarman’s Blue. Both works understood that the most radical response to a culture that has already decided what you look like is not to argue with its images, but to rewire them, or refuse them entirely. The question this film leaves behind: what grows in the space of monsters?
Mahtab Hussain is a British artist whose work explores identity, race, and belonging, particularly within the British Muslim experience. Raised in Birmingham as the child of first-generation Pakistani immigrants, his practice spans photography, sculpture, and installation, creating a visual language that challenges stereotypes and amplifies the voices of underrepresented communities. Recent exhibitions and projects include What Did You Want To See? (Ikon Gallery, 2025), Please Take a Seat (The Line, 2025), and The Forgotten Army Project (2024-2026). His early works include You Get Me? (MACK Books, 2017), Going Back Home to Where I Came From (2016), and Honest With You (2018). His work is held in international collections including the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Government Art Collection, UK. Hussain is currently working on Muslims in America, a cross-country portraiture project tracing the lives of Muslim communities across the US and Canada. Hussain lives and works in West Sussex.
Guy Gunaratne FRSL is a novelist, playwright, and contemporary artist whose work spans literature, theatre, and moving image. Born in London to Sri Lankan parents, Gunaratne explores identity, migration, and cultural memory through politically charged and formally inventive storytelling. Their debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, while also being longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Their second novel, Mister, Mister (2023), expanded this vision globally, interrogating extremism, surveillance, and the politics of representation. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024, Gunaratne has also published essays in Granta, The Guardian, and Wasafiri. Their wider practice includes theatre and moving-image work, notably Here Is The Brick (2025), produced with Mahtab Hussain. They divide their time between London and Malmö.
Ticket Price: £10.00 with Photo London Ticket
Please note, talk tickets are available for purchase and require a valid Photo London Day Ticket or Weekend Pass for the corresponding day.