Masking Nostalgia by Amak Mahmoodian.
Book tickets
Visible Justice
This opening event brings together Amak Mahmoodian, Patricia J. Williams, Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed, alongside a short film by Walid Raad, to explore questions of visibility and resistance. Through image and voice, the event considers how dominant narratives can be challenged and reframed across Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.
Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed open with a spoken exchange begun before Haia Mohammed’s evacuation from Gaza in 2025, sustaining a dialogue across distance and generations. Haia Mohammed reads from The Age of Olive Trees, while Sunnah Khan shares poems on real and imagined border crossings.
Amak Mahmoodian reflects on displacement and her move towards communal, reparative practices, including 120 Minutes, shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Patricia J. Williams examines the power of habeas corpus and the language of legal recognition.
The evening concludes with a conversation, Q&A, and a screening of The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, reflecting on the limits and possibilities of narrating the Lebanese civil wars.
This opening event brings together Amak Mahmoodian, Patricia J. Williams, Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed, alongside a short film by Walid Raad, to explore questions of visibility and resistance. Through image and voice, the event considers how dominant narratives can be challenged and reframed across Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.
Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed open with a spoken exchange begun before Haia Mohammed’s evacuation from Gaza in 2025, sustaining a dialogue across distance and generations. Haia Mohammed reads from The Age of Olive Trees, while Sunnah Khan shares poems on real and imagined border crossings.
Amak Mahmoodian reflects on displacement and her move towards communal, reparative practices, including 120 Minutes, shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Patricia J. Williams examines the power of habeas corpus and the language of legal recognition.
The evening concludes with a conversation, Q&A, and a screening of The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, reflecting on the limits and possibilities of narrating the Lebanese civil wars.
Bios
David Birkin is an artist, writer, and Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of the Arts London. His PhD in Visual Cultures at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, traces histories of aerial violence and acts of resistance, disarmament, lawfare, and counter-forensics. David studied at Oxford University, the Slade, and the Whitney Museum ISP in New York. He is a Visiting Research Fellow in Art History at Cambridge University, exploring the militarised vertical perspective in aerial photography and linear perspective in painting.
Dr Max Houghton is a writer, curator, and educator whose research explores the intersection of the image, law and justice. She leads MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication (UAL). Her recent PhD thesis, Prosecutorial Aesthetics: Image Law Imagination at Nuremberg 1945-46, tracks the influence of the image at the foundational moment for international criminal law. Co-author of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (2025), her writing features regularly in the international arts press.
Sunnah Khan is an award-winning poet, editor, creative facilitator and activist. Her debut pamphlet, I Don’t Know How To Forgive You When You Make No Apology for This Haunting, was published by Rough Trade Books (2020) alongside the radical collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE. Her poems have featured in Poetry London, The Rialto, and Aesthetica. Her more recent work is interested in border crossings, and where the spiritual and political meet.
Dr Amak Mahmoodian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She began her career as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003 at the Art University of Tehran. Since 2007, Amak has been living in the UK, where she practices as a visual artist at the intersection of conceptual image-making and documentary photography. Her practice explores the presentation of gender, identity and displacement, bridging a space between personal and political across platforms and formats including installation, books and films.
Haia Mohammed is a Palestinian poet and artist from Gaza. Her work explores memory, land, and the intimate textures of survival, often weaving personal witness with collective history. The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press, 2025) is her debut pamphlet, written across years marked by displacement, longing, and the insistence on voice. Haia’s creative practice continues to expand across genres and borders. Nominated for the British Book Awards, all sales of the pamphlet go directly to support her family in Gaza.
Walid Raad grew up in Lebanon and now lives and works in the U.S. His videoworks include Up To The South and the recently completed collection of video shorts titled The Dead Weight of Quarrel Hangs. His photography projects include The Beirut Archive — an ongoing documentary photography project of post-civil war Beirut. Walid is also a member of the Arab Image Foundation, started in 1996 to promote historical research of the visual culture of the Arab world, and to promote experimental video production in the region.
Professor Patricia J. Williams is one of the most provocative intellectuals in law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in legal theory. She has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her books and essays, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991), Diary of a Mad Law Professor (The Nation), and The Miracle of the Black Leg (The New Press, 2024), challenge our ideas about the socio-legal constructs of race and gender.
This event is part of Visible Justice's year-long residency. Discover more here.
Book tickets
Wed, 20 May 2026
Cinema 1
06:30 pm
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- We have 1 wheelchair allocated space with a seat for a companion
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
- We have unassigned seating. If you require a specific seat, please reserve this in advance
- Free for visitors where ticket prices are a barrier, please email
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From series 'One Hundred and Twenty Minutes' by Amak Mahmoodian.
From series 'One Hundred and Twenty Minutes' by Amak Mahmoodian.
Sunnah Khan.
Patricia J. Williams.
Haia Mohammed.
From series 'One Hundred and Twenty Minutes' by Amak Mahmoodian.
