This week, a new exhibition from Indonesian artist collective Taring Padi opened at Ibraaz, in London. The group was forged in the 1998 Reformasi movement that overthrew President Suharto's authoritarian regime and you may be forgiven for thinking that the foreboding architecture of what was once a gentlemen’s club was an unlikely setting for radical proposition.

The ground floor space in which Taring Padi’s canvases hang was innaugurated with a presentation of Parliament of Ghosts by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. It was one part of the ambitious Ibraaz project discussed in an interview betweek recessed.space and Sumayya Vally, the South African architect who with her practice Counterspace was tasked with transforming the solid threshold and architecture into something altogether more accomodating and inclusive.

Ibraaz is an initiative of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, dedicated to visual culture from the Middle East and North Africa. It is a place welcoming to all as a new kind of instutution, and while our interview with Sumayya Vally covers her wider architectural work, it folds back into discussion around Ibraaz and how it relates to London and its people.

Details of Taring Padi’s exhibition, on until 22 November, can be found on the Ibraaz’s website HERE.

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Sumayya Vally is an architect with a genuinely interdisciplinary and collaborative practice – as likely to be found curating an arts biennial, developing a community project as she is laying out plans for a grand new architectural project. In 2023, Vally was the inaugural curator of the Islamic Arts Biennial in Jeddah, work that involved not only selecting work and designing the spatial approach for the event, but also collaborating with the wider team on the institutional framework and thinking how to create a new kind of biennial.

Another ongoing high-profile project is the Asiat-Darse pedestrian bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium. Her response to the brief was not one only to solve programmatic and structural needs, but to introduce historical narrative, community collaboration, and de-colonisation practices as part of a green crossing that also acts as memorial to the life of Paul Panda Farnana, one of the most important, yet least acknowledged figures of the city and the nation’s colonial legacy in the Congo.

In 2021 Vally was named as one of 100 Leaders of the Future by Time magazine then later that year opened Counterspace’s Serpentine Pavilion. It was a project embedded with many of the architects’ principles, built around ideas connected to past and existent places of meeting from many of London’s communities. These include the Mangrove restaurant from where Notting Hill Carnival emerged, Dalston’s Four Aces Club, the city’s earliest mosques, the Rio Cinema, Brixton Market, the Feminist Library, the Tabernacle, and Centerprise publishing space – amongst many more all listed on the Counterspace website HERE.

For the first time, the Serpentine Pavilion did not only exist on its usual Hyde Park lawn, but instead included fragments at community spaces across the city as temporal, adaptable, and playful architectural moments that sat alongside collaborations by Vally with various makers and community members on a diverse array of projects including a radio station in Becontree, a sound system at the Tabernacle, and with one of the UK’s first Black publishers, New Beacon Books.

Further recognition followed that of Time and the Serpentine Gallery, including a 2022 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, an honorary Fellowship of the Architectural Institution of Canada, an FT Woman of the Year 2023, is an honorary Professor at UCL Bartlett, and is on the Board of Directors of the World Monument Fund.





In a practice statement, Counterspace state that their work is “dedicated to articulating expressions of hybrid identities and spaces, with a focus on African and Islamic conditions that are both indigenous and diasporic.” This intent is especially present in Vally’s latest project, Ibraaz, a new London cultural space dedicated to advancing critical thought and artistic practice for the Global Majority. It works with and delicately reconfigures a grand neo-classical property on Mortimer Street, just off Portland Place, and while the building is imminently to be opened to the public, Vally’s work on it is not complete.

She will remain connected to Ibraaz as an Architect-in-Residence, further opening up and exploring ways to reconfigure the existing place, but in a collaborative and observant way. This is not a project where the architect conjures a singular design then hands over a jewel of a building, but instead is an iterative project that will evolve to the emergent needs of its audience, users, and developing institutional demands. Thus, Vally is not just an architect of a building, but also the new institutional framework and potentiality of the place, and will stay with Ibraaz following its launch to continue its development.

Ibraaz opens with Ibrahim Mahama’s sculptural, spatial work Parliament of Ghosts, providing a rich aesthetic interjection into the grand ground-floor hall, and also setting out a marker of intent for the space and its future uses. The installation sits in the space perfectly, and marries the disciplines of art and architecture in a subtle, careful way – the subject we began the conversation on:

recessed.space exists as a platform to sit between art and architecture, a space which obviously you are also very much within through your practice, but also with your work on the Ibraaz building here in London. But, before we even locate these thoughts in this building, what is the space between arts and architecture, and how do you operate within it?

I don’t think there is a distinction per se. In the way that I work and think through processes, there is a form or a method of practice – but I often think that when I work as an architect I work as a curator, and when I work as a curator I work as an architect. For example, with the Serpentine Pavilion, or with the Asiat-Darse pedestrian bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium, that I’ve been working on, there is a kind of systems thinking, and a thinking about where things are situated. It’s like an explosion of the brief in a way that thinks about community, collaborators, partners, and an unfolding of happenings through those – and I think that’s something akin to thinking like a curator.

With the Serpentine Pavilion fragments we launched a radio station in Becontree, Dagenham, with the artist Joe Namy, who’s still running the programme, and there were several other similar collaborations. For me, they was really envisioned as part of the conceptualisation of the building. I’m working on a project at the moment that will be in Doha, and it’s very much about the same kind of thinking, where performance is embedded in how the architectural form works and operates, and how it gives a sense of flexibility.

With the Asiat-Darse bridge in Belgium, phase one has opened with small garden structures in honour of Paul Panda Farnana, so children are tending to the garden and learning about him. For me, that feels akin to curatorial thinking, but then when I work as an artistic director and curator, I think about the narrative unfolding, and very spatially and atmospherically about how the works live. It’s not just about hanging things in conversation, it’s about really being with work – it’s very abstract to explain, but I’ve been told that it’s very architectural.

It’s interesting as well, because so many people that work within one sector – whether fine art, film, architecture – often don’t realise they have an awful lot of overlap with other sectors, because they talk in a specific lexicon or to their own crowd. It’s only when you’re talking about and having those conversations that cross over, that it becomes clear there’s a lot of shared thinking.

You mentioned a minute ago that you often find yourself “exploding the brief” – do you find that’s a challenge? Architects often come into a project with a fixed client brief, like to design a bridge from A to B, so it can’t be easy to say to the client you want to explode it and ask “what if we also curate these elements?” Do you find that’s something you have to fight for in architecture, or do you find clients are open to it?

The bridge was a competition which we won, so at the time the client was very open to it. Belgium recently had an election and the government has gone far right, so the client has shifted and has also shifted their approach or vision around the project. But it’s something I definitely believe in, developing different methods for making architecture, learning from different origins of space, making and thinking about, how do I say this, how different ideologies can manifest different ways to make architecture and what that means for building.

I think the logic embedded in the bridge and the pavilion is very much diasporic. There is a structure, and then there are satellite structures, and there’s a relationship between host and home with a network of sorts around how things work, but the physical sites of operation are also thinking about time continuu: there is something happening in the present; there is a catalyst for something to happen in the future.

In the bridge project, we’re thinking about rewilding this formerly very toxic zone where lots of people from the Congo lost their lives toiling the land. I never know when I start working on a project where it will go and I think every time I’m doing something different, I never understand how but the inquiry somehow always results in thinking about amplifying particular voices or looking at things through the lens of history. Somehow it emerges, I think it must come from some intuitions inside, and I’m sure it’s like that for a lot of creative workers.





With the bridge, I never necessarily thought I was the right person to work on the project. I thought that there is somebody who knows Belgian vernacular well and would probably work with the shape of the roofs or something, but then, because layers of history for me are also sites of inquiry, and are quite literally architectural sites, other things started to emerge. I think that is powerful as an architect, but also powerful for us as an audience to situate ourselves around that, because it means that everybody is implicated in everything, we all have a role to play, we all have solidarities to hold and stand with, and we all have contributions to make.

The bridge is in homage to Paul Panda Farnana, the first person from the Congo to study in Belgium and who later became an incredible activist and made a huge contribution to the lives of black people in Belgium. It’s a very underrepresented story and was largely unknown in Belgium, and even in the Congo it’s only in the 1980s that Congolese academics started to write and advocate for him, which is how I learned about him. Sometimes a project can shine a light on something like this.

You mentioned there that projects have a past, present, and future. You don’t know the future of any project, but here at Ibraaz you can help shape the future through relationships in the present. The other two projects change without you – the radio, for example, is currently on show at the Triennale Milano as well as still running in Becontree, so it’s carried over the airwaves and found new lives. But, you there said that because of the elections in Belgium the bridge is also changing direction, that the global shift in politics may make its future different.

There is something about the unknown, which is maybe anti-architectural because architects traditionally like to imagine they have control over both the present object and its perpetual form, that after it’s complete they hand over an immaculate object that is resolute, perfect, and designed to stay the same, never change.

There is something about the intentions with which we set things up and where they go. I worked on setting up several collaborations and each of them has had different life spans. The radio station is still ongoing, and I still have a relationship with the Notting Hill Carnival the tabernacle where I worked with Alvaro Barrington (see recessed.space 00026) on Sound System Sundays at the Tabernacle, and he’s continuing to work with Carnival in his own practice. There are different durations, and for me it was important in that project to catalyse relationships between the Serpentine and other community arts institutions, to bring different knowledges into dialogue, because they can learn from each other, platform each other, and grow from each other when I step away from something. Relationships also do continue, I still have a relationship with the Serpentine and am very involved with them, and the same for the fragments and community arts institutions at other times.

When I worked on the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale it was also very much about setting up the project as well. I feel very lucky, because even though it was very big and daunting at the time, no one will have the same experience of setting it up from nothing. It had no site, no team, and that was really moving to be a part of, but it also did set the trajectory for what the project can become. For me, it was really important coming into that role that had no institutional scaffold or framework. I was given a definition of what Islamic Art is and an expectation of how that would unfold, but it was very important for me to think about what contribution to the definition I was making. At the time, it was very difficult for anyone else to see why it was important or relevant, or to know what my description of it was going to look like and manifest as.





Of course, when it was realised, it became clear that there is the potential and opportunity for other voices to embody those intentions differently, but setting something up, I think regardless of where it goes, we can only try – and then, even if it’s momentary, I really believe in pushing as much as we can for things to exist in the canon. Whether it’s Paul Panda Farnana or a different definition of Islamic art, it will have had an impact on artists most significantly, and perhaps it sounds selfish but also an impact on me and my own research directories, my own relationships. Joe, who runs the radio station, and I worked on a commission together in the first Islamic Arts Biennale for opening, and in the background we are also working on that commission extending here in Ibraaz. So, we take our work with us.

When we were walking up the stairs of Ibraaz to this fifth floor room, you said “this is our office”. Usually, after completing a building and talking at the opening, an architect doesn’t usually use the word “our” any more, after the building is handed over. But this is the beginning of something you’ve been involved in, not just creating the architectural environment, but also as you call it the institutional scaffold. What conditions are you allowing space for at Ibraaz, and how do you feel it may evolve as a place?

The Ibraaz team is incredible and I will speak about working with them in a moment. We got involved in the project very early on and the first people I met were Lina Lazasar and Shumon Basar. The idea at the beginning was to think about the building as a whole, but then then there became this urgency for Ibraaz to open sooner than planned, and at that point I decided to think about this building as a gathering of gatherings – now a term everybody’s adopted – and to really think about what it means to work on a building, not in the way that we would traditionally work on a building, but to think about it more akin to a city, something I’m interested in thinking about through my projects. To be able to be a part of the institutional frameworks, to listen and learn from Lina and the way that she’s thinking about what generosity means in an institution has also been very interesting.





When I started working with research in London, the idea of an institution was an interest, and that’s why the fragments became such an important part of the pavilion, because I was thinking beyond honouring these forms and placing them in the archive for architects, I really wanted to think about what the ingredients are that can make for different institutional logics that will produce different forms of creativity. For the Pavilion, I studied the Mangrove in Notting Hill, which was the headquarters of the Notting Hill Carnival, birthed the West Indian Gazette and the first Calypsos – something that came to be because there were these very different institutional ingredients. There was the presence of mother tongue, there were ingredients and food that came from geographies of home, there was music from all the geographies, and there were people who walked through the doors who came from many different worlds and disciplines – Vanessa Redgrave, Nina Simone, people who played the role of being activists, neighbourhood aunties. It was a mix of things, perhaps unintentionally, that generated so much creativity and birthed these cultural movements.

That’s something I have consistently worked through in every single one of my projects. The Bridge project is thinking about collaborations with the horticultural school and being a part of an embodied curriculum in terms of planting and ecology, but also an historical curriculum and thinking how children can learn history through different methods, then capitalising again this network of relationships with schools and community centres.





The Islamic Arts Biennale was about setting up these relations at the beginning, which involved ideas akin to the Serpentine Pavilion such as the proposition of having a space that would change every year and function like a gift commission, but where people would also be able to inhabit works. We had an endless Iftar table that was 50 metres long, where we broke fast at, but which also hosted artists who worked with food and gathering, and the artists carried these embodied generosities in their work. We had a work that was called Anywhere Can be a Place of Worship by Syn Architects, which literally dissolved into the ground, and is a lesson for us in how to build lightly and touch the earth gently.

Historically, monumental architecture has such a light footprint and is actually made through intention, performance and ritual, rather than bricks and mortar. But the space also hosted prayer, it hosted the recitation of Quran and people singing. That’s something in the way Islamic art has been framed and the definition that it comes from traditionally, from the 17th Century and the perspective of objects, chronology, and geography in very linear lines, rather than actually catalytic, hybrid, and very, very blurry objects of lived and living use. Embodied in the logics of practice and philosophy, I wanted to really re-root the definition of Islamic art so that the method of working, of display, of inhabitation, is aligned with the philosophies that they come from.




Most of the works were to do with sound, performance, and rituals. They were very atmospheric and were always in conversation with historic objects, so that we gave those objects a future by allowing artists to work with them as bodies of research, and we also gave contemporary practices a lineage. We had an artist who was researching how the body meditates on a cellular level with the breaths that exist between the verses of the adhan – we walked up to this breathing instrument which simulates it, and she made these vessels that were shaped according to the sound frequency, so a high pitch had a certain shape and that was in conversation with an astrolabe related to the direction of prayer. That work, by Joe Namy, choreographed the sound of 18 different calls to prayer in places where we wouldn’t necessarily imagine them – a chip shop in Detroit, and a parking garage in Durban, for example.

There’s a method of thinking about what an institution can hold and how it can function when thinking about these. We had artists working with archaeologists to research objects, and then the artworks hosted others. And in the conversations with Lina, it was very much always a part of the way we envision the spaces at Ibraaz to be themed around gatherings in a home with the idea that when an artist inhabits the space it also allows for other artists and people to be hosted in the space. We’re not looking at works, but being with them and living with them. These are spaces for study, for performance, for gathering, for eating, and for me that feels akin to learning from the methods coming from the Mangrove restaurant, from Enterprise publishing house, and other what I call institutional spaces that present different institutional logics.

I was thinking about this place in relation to some of the more traditional geographic-focussed institutions in London, such as the Institut Français or the Goethe-Institut, and how these institutions can be didactic in programming, how they are tools of soft power, how they hold a politics and certain agendas. But this place – as well as other new spaces such as Palestine House down the road or the Africa Centre in Southwark – are perhaps creating a new generation of institutions which may hold a new form, as you speak to, of thinking, learning, and being, but also perhaps of how buildings such as this one on Mortimer Street are inhabited.

You are literally inhabiting a building that amongst its past uses was a gentlemen’s club, so there’s something here about a reframing of London – not wiping it away, which a lot of those people in the far-right march last week may suggest, but about building within and building through histories.

Building through it, yes! Just to go back to your question about the “our office”, we are also thinking about Ibraaz in that building through manner. We’re starting with the ground floor with the Oula [shared surface]. Maktaba [space of learning], and the Majlis [assembly space], and then opening the Minassa [platform] in the lower ground level very soon. it’s thinking about these institutional logics like the Mangrove, Centerprise publishing house, Four Aces, it’s very much working through a building as one would work in a city, rather than thinking about a building as a package that is then handed over to the client. It’s about a being with, living with, and growing from that’s incredibly exciting, very humbling. More than anything, it’s incredibly generative, because firsthand you get to be a part of shaping the institution, quite literally, but the space become traces and sediments in this already very, very long and deep history that we’re in, and traces of our relationships over time.

In this building, how have you dealt with that? In the main exhibition space, where the building has wonderful ocular roof lights, you have added louvred shades over, which is a subtle insertion. But Ibrahim Mahama’s installation with materials from Ghana clearly is a strong juxtaposition with what exists. Then, I noted in drawings up the stairway your drawings about the threshold and façade. Obviously, dealing with historic conservation in such Grade 2 or 2* listed buildings there are architectural concerns and limits, but you are also thinking through the project with conceptual and societal concerns. How do you jigsaw or wed these together, and how do you consider this with nuance or juxtaposition?

I am an architect who has never shied away from making forms and from thinking about scale. Working on the Biennale for me was wonderful, to work on a space of 400,000 square metres and have artists work on installations 50 by 50 metres. But even in the Serpentine Pavilion, it was often commented that I’m a very small person with a very big pavilion! I’m saying that because I also think I am in an upward generation of architects who have moved beyond the starchitect model and who have really recognised we need different methods and models of architecture. I also think that largely as a generation, we are very tentative with thinking about and making form an atmosphere, and I think that there is often a lot of talk, but perhaps we could also benefit from imagination that looks different and is functioning kind aligned with a politics.

You need clients for that. Isn’t it the case that clients are usually a bit slower to move than any current generation of thinking?

Absolutely, and that’s perhaps also why there is so little new imagination at present. On the point of form, I’m interested in the building and its forms and in thinking about its histories and legacies, but I think there’s also the potential to think about the grammar of the building and the use and misuse of the various elements – asking how we can start to create a sense of joy or play in how we appropriate or work with the existing elements of the building. Some of the language of those façade drawings are really thinking about how a seat can become a surface that is also for trade, or a lintel can be lowered and become a surface for transaction or for sharing a coffee, meal, or conversation. Again, these are gestures I really learned from Centerprise publishing house which, for example, had a street front where you could park your bicycle, have a coffee, and also read a book. There are some legal shop fronts we looked at that also had similar façades, then some spaces like the Four Aces Club in Dalston, or how the Tabernacle front porch becomes an extension of their activities and rituals is also very, very interesting.




I am from Johannesburg at heart, and I love Tunisia. I’ve been there for another project and have spent time there observing the way that spaces are inhabited, often with a generosity of use in relation to the form. In Joburg, we have inherited buildings that come from legacies of apartheid, but then the way people appropriate them, use them with ingenuity, or imbue them with different systems and different forms of life is incredibly interesting. So, it’s about thinking how a building with a fabric like this can start to be unravelled and perhaps kept intact and honoured, but also worked with and moulded so that it also performs those functions.

In Oula and Maktaba, to this point of gathering in each space we also started to think about forms of gathering from the diasporas. Oula is the harvest ritual, and it involves the unfolding of a cloth where women come together to dry herbs and spices, to make food, and then people also sit together and eat on that same shared surface. The tables were designed very much with that in mind – you can’t see them right now, but they will jigsaw together and work in a number of different configurations. Our operator, Boutheina Ben Salem, will have a supper club. She will also work on preparing ingredients with women that she works with, and then it will operate and function as a café with small individual tables and that thinking really comes from Oula. The same with Maktaba and the bookshop, I was thinking about a system that is mobile, flexible, and can be configured in many different ways.




In the Minassa, the cinema seats tesselate, so they can be carried around the building easily, but also can be turned on their side – when it’s upright it’s a cinema seat and then on its side, and on its side it functions differently. We were thinking about different forms of convening and performance that we have in the space. The floor is still coming, but it’s going to be a mapping of some of the configurations of a Minassa. The idea is that as we move through the building there are spaces of prayer and spaces of food, and we also think through them.

There is something in this about unstitching this building. Like much of this part of London, the Ibraaz building is quite austere and mannered, and it has a masculine presence. Obviously, as we said, it was once a gentlemen’s club, but it’s also not a soft building, not a generous or welcoming to those that don’t know they’re welcome, deliberately. Part of your work, then, is to unstitch that presence, to make the threshold formally inviting as well as practically. Also, and as you were just speaking to, many of these modes of coming together or activism that you spoke earlier were female led. As so often in communities, it is the women who hold a place together and do – often invisible – work. You mentioned the community auntie at the Mangrove, as well as Nina Simone and Vanessa Redgrave.

It was completely subconscious!

There’s something in this about the architecture as well. Not to minimise architecture to a binary/masculine feminine, but there’s something similar to your processes of decolonising London’s modes of coming together, and in the Otolith Group and the bookshop downstairs, breaking down the existing architecture to reimagine the scaffolding you speak about.

Absolutely, yes. And I think I also have a Johannesburg attitude about the way that I work, which is not to be shy of form and not to be afraid of embracing and reconfiguring what we have. I’m not saying I have this, but I’m aspiring to be able to work with the building, but also to transform it in doing so. I think that is possible and I hope that’s going to come through in the threshold. I think if you come to the building at night, from the street, those two ground floor spaces are complete, like solid blocks of colour. Even just in our setting up, when we have all been here late for a few weeks, people approach and take pictures because it’s a different presence on the street.





I’m really excited about working on the threshold, so that we have these gestures of generosity and gathering starting to animate the space. We’re very lucky that the building is set back a little bit, and we notice that we have people coming to have a smoke or look at their phone. So, I think those spaces already allow for people to have a refuge from the busyness of Mortimer street.