Three tapestries hanging beneath a 536-year-old Islamic-inspired wooden ceiling in east London form the centrepiece of an exhibition linking the city's Muslim communities to Europe's longer history with Islam. The exhibition, titled "I Was Born Here," opened at the V&A East Storehouse after the Victoria and Albert Museum approached artist and architect Shahed Saleem in 2024 to create work responding to the local community and the venue's ornate Torrijos ceiling, which originated from a palace in central Spain.
The first tapestry reproduces verbatim quotations from signs displayed by the British Home Office in 2013 as part of its "Hostile Environment" policy aimed at undocumented immigrants, including "106 ARRESTS LAST WEEK IN YOUR AREA" and "In the UK Illegally?" The text is woven against Alhambra patterns—Islamic geometric art rooted in medieval Spain. A second tapestry depicts a portrait of Altab Ali, a Bangladeshi textile worker murdered in a racially motivated attack in London in 1978 at age 24, and includes an image of the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus's ship that launched Spain's colonisation of the Americas in 1492.
The third tapestry shows a crowded Queen's Market in the Newham district of east London, where shoppers browse for goods. Saleem told Al Jazeera that he chose to depict the market and its residents because "these are the people who are being very largely impacted by legislation and timing that we're seeing," while also representing "a multicultural Britain and a process of arriving, settling, creativity, labour and life."
Historian Tharik Hussain, author of "Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History," said that while the 1400s are often celebrated as Spain's Golden Age, the Spanish Inquisition in that period "ushered in one of Europe's most devastating programmes of religious and ethnic homogenisation." Hussain said hundreds of thousands of European Muslims and Jews were forced into exile, compelled to convert, or driven from their homes.
Saleem told Al Jazeera that "colonisation abroad and the creation of ethno-nationalism at home, these two components became constituent parts of the Modern European nation, which continues today." The exhibition also depicts The Bell Hotel and the Britannia Hotel, both used to host asylum seekers; in July, hundreds of far-right protesters attempted to storm The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, and at least three people were found guilty of violent disorder this month.
