GALLERY

rose issa
a space to show

Rose Issa dismisses the idea that her space is a gallery. “A gallery? No,” she smiles, “I opened not as a gallery, but as a project space. Two and a half years ago, we were working from home – curating, editing, publishing and designing. My flat was not large enough, so we took this ground-floor place where works can come and go to Germany, Italy – wherever – and to public institutions in Britain and elsewhere. Here, we work and have room to do small-scale projects.” Located on busy Kensington High Street in upmarket West London, Rose Issa Projects (RI Projects) is both modest and functional. Yet it is from here that RI Projects directors Issa and Omar Mazhar and their team work tirelessly to fulfil her long-held ambition of giving visibility to the myriad talented and unique Middle Eastern artists, many of whom remain largely unknown outside their own cultures.

Issa has long been an established and respected figure on the Middle Eastern art stage, but the seeds for RI Projects were sown in the 1980s amidst the tumult and trauma of invasion, war and resistance across the region. A mathematics student in Paris at that time, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by audaciously organising her first film festival. It was then that she discovered that nobody knew much about the Middle Eastern situation, or indeed about the artists whom she so liked, admired and respected. She subsequently came to London in 1986 to launch the cultural centre that was to become the Kufa Gallery. “There was a huge community of intellectuals in exile,” she recalls, “and I wanted to introduce artists to each other because we all came from different countries at war. Sometimes I did an exhibition, but it was more....