Sumayya Vally

In a time that feels increasingly uncertain, I find myself returning to how we make home: deliberately, collectively, through community. My studio’s neighbourhood is built with a set of relationships that hold one another up.

My route starts at the Serpentine, one of my favourite places to be inspired and my original home in London. It is free to the public, always a space of meaningful gathering, and consistently offers an incredible programme. From here, a walk through Hyde Park and short bus west will take you to Tiwani Contemporary, who will be showing Breaking Down Realities, a group exhibition. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing works by the designer and artist Nifemi Marcus-Bello, who is featured in the show.

Travelling northward will take you to the edge of Fitzrovia and to Ibraaz, where our studio sits. 

Led by Lina Lazaar, here we are shaping the building as a gathering of gatherings. Oula, Ibraaz’s café-in-residence, draws from harvest rituals. Its founder and chef, Boutheina Ben Salem, is inspired by cyclical harvests as moments of coming together, of preparing and sharing food, marking time through collective labour and generational recipes. Wednesday to Sunday, we have the pleasure of her Tunisian dishes, each one carrying the feeling of being received into a home. Maktaba, Ibraaz’s bookshop, is unfolding through seasons curated by Burley Fisher Books. PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature, inaugurated the first. It brought together a collective of writers and thinkers working across borders to host readings, performances, and conversations that insist on literature as a form of presence and resistance. Evenings at Ibraaz have been filled with poetry, testimony, music—rooms held in attention, in grief, and imagination.

Nearby, a cluster of galleries offer a rich host of changing exhibitions. Ab-Anbar, our neighbour, has really become a place for its community: hosting Iranian meals, film screenings, space and time to be together—something that feels more necessary than ever for us to make sense of the world. During London Gallery Weekend, they will be showing Parallel Modernities: Tehran and Rome, a group exhibition of work by Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddam, Behjat Sadr, Bahman Mohassess, Parviz Tanavoli, and Marcos Grigorian. This timely presentation studies the cultural exchanges between Iran and Italy during the 1950s and 70s to explore the experience of modernism as rupture rather than progress. 

Around the corner, on Great Portland St, Niru Ratnam is showing a major solo exhibition of work by Keith Piper. Piper, a founding member of the BLK Art Group—the catalyst for what would later be recognised as the Black British Arts movement in the 1980s—draws on archival fragments and layered references, using juxtaposition and accumulation to reveal the politics embedded within images and objects. 

A few doors up, TANK—the office cum exhibition and event space of the eponymous magazine—offers a different atmosphere each time: a youth culture Palestinian support pop-up, intimate exhibitions with niche designers, or a deep archive of printed matter to lose oneself in—never the same space twice. 

I end my route a bit further afield, at Indigo+Madder in Holborn. Their group show, Diaphonous, brings together artists “from the diasporas of South Asia and Middle East, whose practices operate at the threshold between psychological interiority and the external, social world.” Included in the exhibition is work by Lalitha Lajmi, a self taught artist whose career spanned over five decades and was one of the first women in Mumbai to establish an independent printmaking press, etching, inking, and pulling every print by hand.