Here Is the Brick

Here Is the Brick, 2025
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 13:39
Commissioned by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Courtesy the artists.

Title card from Here Is the Brick: a hand holding a brick in front of shop shelves

Here Is the Brick splices footage of racist 1980s British television, anti-Muslim political rhetoric, and news coverage of the 2005 London bombings into a layered essay film about the experience of being Muslim in Britain. The film moves through caricature, stereotype, and violence, the accumulated media images that have shaped how British Muslim identity has been constructed from outside, before turning toward the personal archive, the family image, the gestures and rhythms of inherited life. What accumulates is not a rebuttal but a transformation: the ugly made strange, the shameful reclaimed, the quotidian asserted against the political.

The film’s formal strategy is accumulation: images placed in relation to each other across decades, the rhythm of cutting carrying an argument that no single image could make alone. It is work about the sum of identity markers (those self-imposed, which are beautiful and intimate, and those socially imposed, which are often brutal and shameful) and about what it means to accept them all as your own while understanding that in that acceptance lies the power to subvert.

Stills

  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Baby and parents on a beach
    Archival Stills
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: South Asian man holding a rock
    Original Footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Children in a nativity play
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Mother and child in a bedroom
    Archival Stills
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Hands exchanging bangles
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: ITN broadcast of Tony Blair
    ITN broadcast
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Sky News broadcast
    Sky News broadcast
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Broadcast footage of Rishi Sunak
    Broadcast footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Man in prayer
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: News footage
    News footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Graffiti
    Archival Stills
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Terraced house in the 1970s
    Personal archive
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Actor in an action film
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: South Asian actor in an action film
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: South Asian actor in a night scene
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Portrait of a girl in a hijab
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Naseem Hamed after a fight
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Young woman being interviewed
    Archival footage
  • Still from Here Is the Brick: Two children in a living room
    Archival Stills