Women team up to explore female Muslim experience through arts

A truly modern collective, Variant Space founders Nasreen Raja and Nasreen Shaikh Jamal Al Lail met not at art school or in a studio, but on Instagram. In an interview with TLE, both artists identified themselves as British Muslims with deep connections to other places. They love to explore ideas of identity, culture, faith and gender through their work. Nasreen Raja specialises in printed textiles, inspired by childhood memories of Pakistan as well as growing up a British Muslim. Nasreen Shaikh Jamal Al Lail is a photographer raised partly in Saudi Arabia, creating mixed media pieces.

Together, the two have created Variant Space, a collective of Muslim female artists who are passionate about developing discourses through their works of art: “In essence, our sole objective is to display variations in talent within the Muslim female community and conquer the stereotypes.”

“We formed the collective after having met on social media – Instagram,” says Nasreen Jamal Al Lail. “It began as an online archive last year, and then organically developed into a community of artists. Having come from artistic backgrounds ourselves, we appreciated the richness and diversity in the various artistic forms the community offered.

“We were also acutely aware of the huge lack of platforms allowing Muslim women to take control over how they wished to portray themselves – most media representations were rather poor, limited and, at times, patronising as well as derogatory. Our main motivation to set up the space was to overcome these obstacles with artistic sense. It’s about taking charge; about freedom and choice.”

The collective’s aim is to subvert “current misused and ill-drawn” conclusions in popular culture about Muslim women through creative expression. This can take the form of workshops, talks and exhibitions, all aimed at enabling the artists to be part of a “constructive interconnected environment”.

It wants to capture not just the intricacies and nuances of the British female Muslim experience, but of Muslim female experiences from across the globe. “We have artists from all over the world – Egypt, Afghanistan, just to name a few,” says Nasreen. “And they all contribute to a finely woven fabric in our collective. What is most unique is our shared vision of empowerment through artistic representation.”

Nasreen is keen to point out that the collective is not inward looking, not self-isolating as a Muslim collective – its aim is to include everyone in a dialogue: “Variant Space does not prescribe to any ‘isms’ and it is not concerned with the process of ‘othering’”, she says.