Magid Magid

Changing Ideas Award
"Faith Amongst the Ruins" responds to anti-Muslim and migrant hatred in Britain and to the wider political question of who is allowed to feel safe, visible and fully human in public space. The work emerged from places marked by far-right violence, where Muslims and migrants were made to feel unwelcome in towns they already call home. It is rooted in a simple refusal, the refusal to let fear have the final word.
At the centre of the piece is prayer. Here, prayer is not treated as private retreat or quiet consolation. It becomes a public act of witness, dignity and resolve. By returning to sites shaped by violence and standing there in devotion, the work turns faith into a form of civic presence. It asks what it means to remain visible where hatred has tried to produce silence, and what it means to answer exclusion not by disappearing, but by staying.
The social issue at its heart is not only Islamophobia and xenophobia, though that is central. It’s also the wider erosion of democratic belonging, when racism, misinformation and racialised suspicion distort who gets to move through public life without fear. In that climate, ordinary acts such as prayer, gathering and simply being present can become charged with political meaning.
I wanted the work to resist spectacle. Rather than reproduce the violence of the moment, it offers another image, one shaped by vulnerability, moral clarity and defiance. It holds grief and courage together. It insists that tenderness is not weakness, and that spiritual practice can also be a language of resistance.
Ultimately, "Faith Amongst the Ruins" is about more than aftermath. It’s about dignity under pressure, the right to belong without qualification, and the possibility of meeting hostility with a presence that refuses to be diminished. - the artist