NEW DUTCH VIEWS

Marwan Bassiouni began to produce New Dutch Views while studying at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2018. This ongoing photography series documents the Dutch landscape from the inside of mosques in the Netherlands. The artist travelled across rural, coastal and metropolitan areas across the country searching for locations. Rather than creating a visual study of contemporary Islamic architecture, Bassiouni suggests a different way of looking at Islam in the West. By placing the viewer inside the mosques, on a prayer rug and facing a window, the series provides a contemplative visual experience, encountered through the artist’s symbolic approach to documentary photography.

In 2019, the results of the project were presented in an exhibition at the Hague Museum of Photography and in the book New Dutch Views. Two years later, in the summer of 2021, Marwan Bassiouni extended the series by visiting additional locations in the Netherlands. So far, New Dutch Views counts more than 50 photographs produced throughout the country.

For 87 Gallery, Bassiouni presents a combination of the early photographs and his latest work, displayed here as a floor to ceiling projection that moves slowly from setting to setting. This new method of display allows the viewer to become immersed in these spaces.

Marwan Bassiouni

Marwan Bassiouni (born 1985, Morges, Switzerland) is an artist photographer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work aims to find the beauty in everyday life, celebrating the differences and similarities found in our globalized world. In 2018 Bassiouni began photographing the Dutch landscape from the inside of mosques in the Netherlands. This has resulted in a series of more than fifty photographs entitled New Dutch Views.