When the Victorian artist Lord Frederic Leighton built a domed room in his London studio inspired by the reception halls of Damascene houses, he described it as “something beautiful to look at once in a while”.
The densely ornamented Arab Hall at Leighton House, with its Byzantine-style gilt dome, ornamented tiled walls, Islamic calligraphy, a marble fountain and a chandelier inspired by drawings from the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus is an example of the fascination with epic journeys and other worlds that defined the decorative arts of the Victorian era.
Today, as Leighton House celebrates its first centenary as a public museum, it finds the country in a more insular mood – with a growing backlash against globalisation, world trade and cultural dialogue of the kinds that allowed Lord Leighton and his contemporaries to travel the world and collect artefacts.
Determined to keep the artist and collector’s spirit alive, the museum has commissioned four artists to respond to the Arab Hall with new works to mark the museum’s first hundred years.
The first installation which opens to the public this week is by the London and Beirut-based Lebanese artist Ramzi Mallat. Thousands of blue ceramic beads have been woven together in a chain-mail technique like a textile, draping down from the chandelier.
The beads are shaped like discs, no bigger than a centimetre in diameter, with eight circles surrounding a ninth central one. They are an ancient Syriac rendition of the ‘evil eye’, an ancient superstition that is widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Lebanon, Turkey and Greece.
It holds that an envious person’s glare can cause harm to the person they envy – but a more widely known icon is an Islamic symbol of the eye made of blue and white blown glass.
Entitled Atlas of an Entangled Gaze the installation prompts reflections on who is being looked at, who is being protected and how cultural symbols travel and transform across centuries.
“I always go back to that central belief and theme is because I feel like it really becomes an explanation in regards to uncertainty within the region, and it's one of those material and immaterial beliefs that still kind of is pervasive within the region and also globally,” he told The National.
The work also tries to build on the relationship between the Hall’s fountain and its adjacent Narcissus hall, which is named after the Greek mythological character who fell in love with his own reflection. “Maybe Narcissus’ tale and myth was a re appropriation of the evil eye, but for Western traditions, because of the same force of the gaze, malevolence of the gaze,” he said.
The work also considers Mallat’s own identification with the space, which purports to represent Arab culture, but from the perspective of an outsider.
While he views Lord Leighton’s efforts as a “love letter to the region” it ignored the people at the heart of it, and “bred orientalist viewpoints without having proper representation by the voices that actually carry this heritage and these histories,” he said.
“It (the Hall) feels foreign. And this same feeling of being foreign and being also a diasporic individual in a foreign space that's supposed to represent me, created all of these tensions that I wanted to really bring to the forefront,” he said.
Lord Leighton’s legacy fits into two contradicting debates about museums in the UK. Many will now view his collecting and fascination with the Middle East as an example of the Orientalism of his time – a symptom of colonial-era arrogance and disregard for the cultural property of others.
But the opposite can also be argued: in times of growing isolationism and backlash against multiculturalism in the UK, Lord Leighton represents a cosmopolitanism that risks disappearing in the UK.
Whispering artefacts
Award-winning British Syrian filmmaker Soudade Kaadan’s new film about Leighton House weaves in her own experience of exile.
The film When the Tiles Spoke at first appears like a documentary about the Arab Hall, with sweeping views of the staircase leading up to the rooms, close ups of the tiles and the architectural detail. But it soon emerges that artefacts are speaking to each other – using voice overs recorded by actor Khalid Abdalla and others.
One tile tells the mosaic of a mermaid playing the harp to be quiet. “Shh … if they hear you, siren, who knows what will happen. Visitors aren't used to mosaics and tiles whispering,” it says.
“Perhaps they should be,” she responds. As visitors and the museum's conservators leave and night falls, the tiles then take on a life of their own – they talk about their lost homes, and lament how much time has passed, and the short memories of the museum's caretakers.
Kaadan first visited the museum in 2023, when she had been barred from returning to her native Damascus and Syria by the regime during the civil war. She came to the UK in 2012 on an exceptional talent visa.
“I was moved to find those tiles here, this small oasis of tranquillity in the middle of London. For a moment, I felt I was not so far from home,” she says of her film.
She adds that the tiles have had a similar journey to her own, taken away from their home in Damascus to London. “These tiles had also made a journey they did not choose. They too had been lifted from their place, carried across distances, set into walls far from where they began,” she said.
The Arab Hall is one of the main features of Leighton House, which took four years to build by the time it was complete in 1881, and recently underwent a major renovation in 2022. A gold mosaic frieze featuring a peacock was designed with glass pieces from Venice, and are a likely nod to a similar frieze at the 12th century palace of La Ziza in Palermo. The mosaic floor designed by the Hall’s architect George Acheson.
In the early 2000s the gallerist Rose Issa, whose gallery was then across the road from Holland Park, frequently organised exhibition there. This included retrospectives of the Iraqi-Kurdish painter Walid Siti, and Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, both in 2008.
This initiated the Museum’s transformation into a community space for a growing contemporary Middle Eastern art scene that increasingly found itself in London.
More recently Shahrzad Ghaffari was commissioned to create a mural inspired by the Persian poet Rumi for a new extension of the museum in 2023.
Two more artists will be exhibited following Mallat’s work later in the year. From May, British Bangladeshi artist Kamilah Ahmed will present Facets in Resonance, a mixed-media embroidered textile arch, which will sit over the fountain in the Arab Hall, framing a new view on the space.
The final installation will be From Water, Every Living Thing by calligrapher and artist Soraya Syed, the first Briton to be awarded an icazetname, a traditional licence certifying mastery in Islamic calligraphy, from 31 July.
An exhibition tracing the history of the Arab Hall will also open, informed by new research from Dr Melanie Gibson and her book Frederic Leighton: Traveller and Collector.
