Soul City Arts

14/09/2026

14/09/2026

We recently joined forces with Islamic Relief UK and Soul City Arts for a special food bank event at the Foundation Community Hub. 💙

For the event, our usual food pantry was transformed into a food bank, with Islamic Relief volunteers helping to pack 65 bags for local families.

It was brilliant to see organisations working together to support people across Birmingham and show what can be achieved when we combine our efforts.

Thank you to everyone who helped make the day possible.

11/09/2026

Some events end when the room empties. But the conversations started at the ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ have carried on.

We brought together artists, photographers, academics and community voices in a critical dialogue on what photography, power, opacity and representation mean for Muslims today. We succeeded in challenging assumptions, opening new perspectives and posing questions that continue to be debated.

It was a powerful reminder of what can happen when artistic practice, academic research and lived experience are thoughtfully curated — and when dialogue becomes the beginning, rather than the end, of the event.

01/09/2026

Symposium is now Official Sold Out

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim begins with a question about representation, but the programme takes us somewhere deeper.

What happens when visibility itself becomes part of the problem? When Muslim artists are expected not simply to make work, but to explain, translate and make themselves legible? What gets lost when complicated lives are reduced into images that institutions, commissioners and audiences already know how to read?

Across an afternoon of keynotes, artist presentations, conversations and a closed-door listening circle, photographers, artists, academics, and curators will approach these questions from very different positions. It aims to create a space for the contradictions that often disappear from conversations about Muslim representation.

Presented by Soul City Arts, University of Warwick led by and Academic lead , featuring a selection of panels, spotlights, keynotes and conversations. Curated by Mohamed Somji Mohamed Somji
📆 Monday, September 7 • 1:00 PM - 8 PM
📍Oxford House, London, England OxfordHouse1884

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

Scan the code to join our WhatsApp community…

Or follow this link https://chat.whatsapp.com/KOoBwgw8ffPDvPiwe6z7GT

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