'Red T-Shirt, baseball jacket, car', Mahtab Hussain, You Get Me, 2012 © Mahtab Hussain
'Young man asleep', Mahtab Hussain, You Get Me, 2010 © Mahtab Hussain
'Grey polo, hair design, car', Mahtab Hussain, You Get Me, 2012 © Mahtab Hussain
'Friends, curry sauce n' chips', Mahtab Hussain, You Get Me, 2012 © Mahtab Hussain
Mahtab Hussain’s You Get Me? is a series of 53 photographs of young Asian men and boys taken in Britain over a nine-year period.
Hussain, who was born to Pakistani parents in Glasgow, began the project in 2009 in an effort to shine new light on the underrepresented experience of his subjects.
The portraits in You Get Me? were commissioned by and shown at Autograph gallery in London in 2017, with 24 of them then touring to Impressions Gallery in Bradford in 2018 and to Gallery Oldham in 2019.
The four portraits acquired for Gallery Oldham are ‘Grey polo, hair design, car’, ‘Young man asleep’, ‘Friends, curry sauce n’ chips’ and ‘Red t-shirt, baseball jacket, car’.
Hussain has talked about the descriptive titles as an important aspect of the work, saying that they immortalise the sitter ‘in the art-historical narrative’ while at the same time they ‘reclaim the scientific apparatus regarding the colonial experience’.
The four photographs now join the holdings at Gallery Oldham, where they make a dramatic contrast with the many formal historical portraits in the collection, as well as providing increased representation of the local community, where one in five people is Muslim.
Provenance
Will be printed new for purchase. Edition of 3.