Soul City Arts invites you to attend Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a one-day photography symposium led by Mohammed Ali Aerosol with the support of Dr. James Hodkinson and curated by Mohamed Somji.

Why the symposium:
Muslims in the West are perpetually summoned to appear: to be counted, included, diversified, made legible. This symposium begins by asking what the demand for representation itself costs. Whether the framing comes from outside or from within, the frameworks through which Muslim experience is rendered visible tend to flatten more than they reveal. The “acceptable” Muslim is curated for comfort; the box is ticked; the image is sanitised; the complexity is lost.

A critical conversation:
Bringing together artists, curators, and academics working against these conditions, the symposium treats photography as a site of refusal and reimagination, a medium uniquely placed to disrupt commercial templates, social media flatness, and the prescriptive norms that have come to stand in for Muslim life. Authenticity cannot be commissioned or institutionally sanctioned. It emerges from individual experience, lived contradiction, and the artist’s insistence on questioning these paradigms.