Artist Ramzi Mallat transforms Leighton House with Syriac evil eye charms in an installation confronting orientalism, protection and power.
Beneath a grand dome, pierced by arched windows of stained glass, where ceramic tiles carry the curves of Arabic calligraphy, and white marble columns frame the recesses, accented by intricately carved mashrabiya, the Arab Hall of Leighton House holds its visitor in a particular kind of spell.
Light filters through the wooden latticework in fractured patterns, cooling the air and softening the grandeur. Below, a black marble fountain anchors the room in stillness.
Into this layered interior, over 7,500 rounded, deep-turquoise glazed ceramic discs now hang, suspended beneath the chandelier, their perforations fracturing the light further still and casting new shadows across ornate surfaces already dense with history.
Syriac in origin, each of these charms measures about 2.5 centimetres, perforated with multiple holes, and woven together by golden chains into a dense, armour-like canopy.
Together, they form Atlas of an Entangled Gaze, an installation by artist Ramzi Mallat, commissioned by Leighton House Museum to mark its centenary.
Their form gestures towards protection through an ancient visual language, warding against the evil eye.
Yet here, suspended above the fountain of Lord Leighton’s Hall, they seem to do something else: they look back.
The Arab Hall itself, where Ramzi intervenes, has long been framed through a particular lens.
As one early description puts it: “Built originally to provide a setting for some exquisite blue tiles, brought by Lord Leighton from Damascus, the Arab Hall remains the most perfect representation of an oriental interior to be found in London.”
Drawing on the Hall’s layered history, and Lord Leighton’s fascination with Middle Eastern craft traditions, Ramzi’s installation works within his conceptual and visual vocabulary, creating constellations of protection – a phrase that recurs across his practice – referencing symbols of the evil eye, often rendered in shades of blue.
Where the amulet “uses its powers ceaselessly on behalf of the person who carries it,” the talisman is “intended to perform one specific task.” Ramzi’s installation operates on both registers: each charm is an amulet in its own right, imbued with protective power, while the whole is a talisman with a singular intent.
But, rather than directing that protection outward, Ramzi turns it back onto the space itself.
Lord Leighton’s orientalist gaze, which originally shaped the Arab Hall, becomes the locus of inquiry. Here, the eyes no longer simply adorn or guard; they look back at the space, implicating the viewer in the act of looking.
It is no coincidence that Leighton conceived the Hall as a private indulgence: “For the sake of something beautiful to look at once in a while.” Ramzi takes that invitation literally, and charges it, proposing a work that instead “could be something beautiful to look back at you.”
Toxic dust, sacred objects
Ramzi came across the Syriac evil eye charm almost by accident during his research, through a conversation with a curator.
Unlike the turquoise teardrop, or the circular and spherical illustrative eye motif familiar across the Mediterranean, the Arab world, and beyond, this version resembles a cog more than an eye – its symbolic legibility worn away by its deceptive simplicity, and centuries of civilisational overlap.
That opacity matters to him. “If I come from that region, and have never been able to see that before,” he says, “then audiences wouldn’t be able to either.” The charm carries the weight of something almost lost: an artefact whose meaning has eroded, even in its place of origin.
The choice of blue and gold is deliberate. While blue is associated with protective amulets, gold, Ramzi notes, reads differently on darker skin – warmer, more resonant. The Hall’s own visual language, its blues and golds already encoding what he describes as a specifically “Eastern” aesthetic, makes the installation feel less like an intervention and more like a continuation.
Mass-produced in factories, where the glaze routinely clogs the perforations and where very few kilns remain capable of firing them, the ceramic discs that make up the installation are produced in Turkey’s industrial regions and shipped from Istanbul.
In doing so, Ramzi has brought objects back into Sir Leighton’s Arab Hall from the very regions that inspired it.
For Ramzi, the process is as painstakingly deliberate as it is meditative.
Spanning several months, the work involves inspecting each disc, examining its weak points, identifying where it is possible to interject with the diamond drill without breaking the piece, and conceiving how it will fit into the larger installation.
The discs take multiple days to dry and must be cleaned individually. They are drilled in water because the dust is highly toxic – the toxicity of the process stands in stark contrast to its protective purpose.
