As part of the centenary programme at Leighton House, Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Ramzi Mallat inaugurates the museum’s Arab Hall: Past and Present series with Atlas of An Entangled Gaze, his first institutional commission in the United Kingdom. Installed beneath the soaring dome of the Arab Hall, the work unfolds as a suspended canopy of thousands of luminous blue ceramic talismans hovering above the historic fountain, transforming one of London’s most iconic nineteenth century interiors into a charged architecture of visibility, memory, and surveillance.
Conceived by Frederic Leighton following his travels across North Africa and the Middle East, the Arab Hall has long existed in a complicated space between fascination and projection. Completed in 1881 as an extension to Leighton’s studio-house, the room assembled Damascus tiles, Islamic ornament, mosaics, and collected objects into a Victorian interpretation of the “Orient,” one that simultaneously preserved, aestheticised, and displaced the cultures it referenced. Mallat’s intervention does not attempt to soften those contradictions. Instead, it enters directly into dialogue with them.
Constructed through thousands of glazed ceramic “eyes” linked together using chainmail-like techniques inspired by Medieval Ottoman Islamic helmets, Atlas of An Entangled Gaze draws from the Syriac evil eye charm while echoing the mashrabiya structures and grape motifs embedded throughout the Arab Hall itself. The installation oscillates continuously between ornament and warning, protection and exposure. As visitors move beneath the canopy, the suspended elements shift subtly with air and movement, destabilising the boundary between viewer and viewed.
“The work behaves more like an intervention, a filter or a membrane that intercepts light, redirects vision, and alters spatial perception,” Mallat tells us. “It reorients the body in relation to the architecture, and disrupts the decorative symmetry of the space. In that sense, Atlas of An Entangled Gaze doesn’t just occupy the space, it rewrites the conditions under which it is experienced.”
Based between London and Beirut, Mallat’s practice frequently engages with collective memory, folklore, material culture, and the unstable afterlives of inherited symbols. Working across sculpture, installation, and moving image, the artist approaches heritage less as a fixed archive than as a living and contested condition, one capable of carrying contemporary sociopolitical urgency. In Atlas of An Entangled Gaze, that investigation becomes inseparable from the politics of looking itself.
When we asked Mallat whether he understood the “threshold between histories” referenced in the work as a passage or as a permanent state of in-betweenness, the artist rejected the idea of resolution altogether. “For me, the threshold is not a passage, it’s a condition,” he explains. “I believe that histories don’t resolve, they overlap, collide, and bleed into one another.” What interests him instead is “suspension,” a state in which multiple temporalities and narratives coexist without hierarchy. “Meaning becomes porous when contradiction is the only stable ground.”
That instability extends directly into the gaze itself. Suspended above the viewer, the thousands of ceramic eyes transform looking into something reciprocal and uneasy. “The gaze is no longer singular,” Mallat explains. “The work destabilises the boundary between observer and observed, therefore implicating the viewer.” Rather than positioning the spectator outside the work, Atlas of An Entangled Gaze absorbs them into a wider structure of exposure. “You’re not just being looked at, but instead engaged in a wider sphere of seeing.”
The evil eye itself becomes central to this destabilisation. Traditionally understood as both protective object and warning sign, the symbol allows Mallat to move between folklore and contemporary anxiety without collapsing one into the other. “The evil eye belief itself is ambivalent,” he says.“Both protective and malevolent at the same time.” Through repetition, the installation constructs what he describes as “a collective gaze,” one linked not only to Levantine material culture, but also to contemporary systems of surveillance, artificial intelligence, and warfare. “With this commission, I am interested in highlighting the perpetual fear and anxiety we all have in constantly being watched.”
Yet perhaps the most charged aspect of the installation emerges from its relationship to the Arab Hall itself. Rather than treating the historic interior as a neutral backdrop, Mallat approaches it as an active site of historical tension. “The Arab Hall is a historic interior, but it is also a contentious space,” he notes. “It is a hybridised and layered constructed vision.” Referring directly to the Victorian and Orientalist lens through which the space was conceived, the artist describes the room as one shaped not only by admiration, but also by “displacement, extraction, and appropriation.”
Hovering above the fountain “like a veil or canopy of watchful eyes,” the installation therefore becomes both native and foreign within the room itself. “I wanted to give a space that is constantly being gazed at the agency to look back,” Mallat explains. Rather than resolving the tensions embedded within the Arab Hall, the work amplifies them, the installation to operate simultaneously as ornament, talisman, sociopolitical critique, and architectural intervention.
That tension between fragility and defense runs throughout the work materially as well. Linking ceramic tradition with chainmail structures, the suspended canopy never appears entirely stable. “The work holds itself in a state of perpetual oscillation between shielding and revealing, between structure and collapse,” Mallat says. Even memory itself becomes unstable within this system. “The gaze functions less as a visual mechanism and more as a structural position of the witness,” he reflects later in our conversation. “The act of looking functions less as a mechanism of passive reception and more as an active condition through which memory is recalled, generated, and sustained.”
Ultimately, Atlas of An Entangled Gaze resists closure. It refuses the comfort of fixed interpretation, just as it refuses the neutrality of vision itself. “I personally don’t believe that looking has ever been neutral,” Mallat concludes. “Looking produces realities. It can fascinate, seduce, expose, and implicate, or it can erase, exclude, censor, and disable.” Within the Arab Hall, those realities remain suspended above the viewer, unstable and unresolved, the act of seeing is never without implication.
