Walk through the doors of Mosaic Rooms in Kensington and its whitewashed walls shimmer with jewel-like shards of cobalt blue, emerald green and ruby-red light. It’s light filtered through Four Moons From Home, a permanent commission by Palestinian artist Dima Srouji comprising four stained-glass windows made from Jerusalem stone in Bethlehem using a technique found across Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Depicting seasonal flora – from pomegranates and figs to pea shoots – they cast shifting patterns as the daylight changes. For the centre’s new director Pip Day, it was important that Palestinian stone and craftsmanship became part of the refurbished Cromwell Road building’s permanent fabric.
“For me, Palestine remains our compass,” Day tells Broadsheet. While Mosaic Rooms continues to spotlight artists from the Arab world and its diasporas, she sees its flexible programme as necessarily responsive to the political moment. “When the geopolitical situation changes, an organisation must adapt and accommodate.” This translates to treating the spaces at Mosaic Rooms as adaptable ways of responding to conflict, displacement and resistance.
Mosaic Rooms, which has been showcasing and celebrating contemporary Arab culture since 2008, reopened in February following a year-long refurbishment. It is now hosting Sounding Towards – –, a five-month exhibition with three parts that unfolds across the building’s multiple levels. Downstairs, the sounds of Al-Rashid Street – one of Gaza’s main thoroughfares, which follows the Mediterranean shoreline – fill a blacked-out gallery. In From–To, a 17-minute installation by Gaza’s Dahaleez Collective, waves break against the shoreline, traffic bleats and voices drift in and out. Recorded during 2024 and 2025, these everyday noises – ones many would take for granted – have become evidence of a city altered beyond recognition, visually and sonically.
Upstairs, visitors move from listening to being encouraged to make noise themselves. Designed with Tunis-based El Warcha Collaborative Design Studio, Common Frequencies is where a rehearsal room, recording studio and public living room collide into one. Sitars sit alongside cassette players and piles of cushions; visitors can record tapes, play instruments or browse a music library featuring everything from Palestinian cassettes to Habibi Funk records.
For curator Angelina Radaković, the exhibition grew from thinking about how Mosaic Rooms has been used in recent years, as a place of gathering and often as a place of refuge. Amid the war in Gaza, taking a traditional approach to curating exhibitions began to feel inadequate. Instead, she wanted to create something closer to an imperfect rehearsal – unfinished, improvised and shaped by the people contributing sound. “We are experimenting in institutional openness,” Radaković explains, “in the organisation loosening its curatorial hold and extending its space and resources to others to occupy and shape.”
The third strand of Sounding Towards – – is a rolling programme of artist takeovers. This month, music and performance collective 1000 Pounds to Survive Us will move into the gallery, using it as a space to practise, rehearse and record throughout a month-long residency. Visitors might encounter the band at work or even be invited to participate. Whatever is made here, from impromptu performances to children singing with their parents on cassette, will contribute to Mosaic Rooms’s evolving sonic archive. There are also hopes that the centre’s new recording suite might eventually play host to a community radio station.
The recent refurbishment also responds to the stark inequalities of Mosaic Rooms’s Kensington neighbourhood, where extreme wealth exists alongside migrant families living in nearby hotels. Its free programme includes artist-led sessions for families seeking refuge, early-years workshops and a collective for 18-to-25-year-olds. “Play is a human right,” Day says when describing how important it was to feature this community-focused element as part of the refurbishment.
Mosaic Rooms Bookshop on the ground-level extends this mission. Its shelves move between Palestinian poetry, Sudanese cookbooks, children’s stories, plays from post-revolutionary Iran, theory, zines and independent magazines. Reading lists are also devised with artists for each exhibition, encouraging its ideas to travel far beyond the bookshop.
The unfinished title of Sounding Towards – – is deliberate, Radaković says. The project’s beauty lies in not knowing how it will look or sound by the end, and in discovering what emerges when people are invited to make noise with abandon.
Sounding Towards – – is at Mosaic Rooms, London, until November 29. Entry is free.
1000 Pounds to Survive Us are playing on August 5 and 27 at 7pm.
