About

Hussain & Gunaratne is the collaborative practice of British artist Mahtab Hussain and British novelist, playwright and visual artist Guy Gunaratne.

Working across video, film, and installation, the collaboration explores identity, belonging, and the contested cultural landscapes of contemporary Britain. Their work draws on personal archive, found footage, documentary material, and the formal languages of both visual art and literary fiction.

Hussain & Gunaratne make work at the intersection of identity, transgression, and the politics of representation. Their films and installations draw on archival material, personal history, and popular culture to explore how British Muslim and South Asian experience has been constructed, distorted, and reclaimed across decades of media, political rhetoric, and cultural production.

The work refuses polemic in favour of accumulation: images, sounds, and gestures placed in relation to each other until the pattern they make becomes visible. It is work about the quotidian weight of misrepresentation, and about what it might mean to refuse that weight, to make something defiantly alive from within it.

The collaboration sits within a tradition of Black and Asian British filmmaking that includes Steve McQueen, John Akomfrah, while referencing international artists including Arthur Jafa, Hank Willis Thomas: artists for whom the question of how images make and unmake identity and relation is both a formal and a political question, inseparable from the work’s subject.