Paul Mellon Centre x The Sunderland Collection
An academic partnership centred around art.
The Paul Mellon Centre and The Sunderland Collection are delighted to announce a new collaboration on the theme of counter-colonialism and embodied mapping, commencing with a free presentation of work by Nubian artist Fathi Hassan.
This new collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre is centred around a hang of works by Fathi Hassan, 4 June 2026 to 15 January 2027. This hang will unfold across the Centre’s Grade II-listed rooms, in an exploration of history, cartography, memory, displacement, and colonialism.
Curated by Beth Greenacre of The Sunderland Collection Art Programme, the hang reflects a shared commitment of both The Sunderland Collection and the Paul Mellon Centre to bring together contemporary artistic practice and historical research. Both institutions emphasise the role of artist-led inquiry in generating new knowledge and perspectives.
The hang features works of photography, drawing, and mixed media with a core set of works from ‘Shifting Sands’, Fathi’s response to The Sunderland Collection from his participation in the Art Programme in 2024.
Untitled (2023) Mixed media on paper, 38 x 42 cm ©Fathi Hassan, Courtesy The Sunderland Collection
The Sunderland Collection comprises maps, atlases, books, and globes dating from the 13th to the early 19th century. Its Art Programme, established in 2024, connects cultural heritage and contemporary artistic practice from around the world. Much like a residency, it invites artists to engage with, and respond to, pieces from the collection in their preferred medium. Hassan’s participation in the programme has resulted in a powerful new body of work responding to the Collection’s holdings, originally exhibited in Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands, at No. 9 Cork Street in 2024.
Born in Cairo in 1957 to Egyptian and Nubian parents, Hassan rose to prominence in the 1980s and was among the first artists of African heritage included in the Venice Biennale (1988). Now based in Edinburgh, his multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, photography, and installation, shaped by lived experience across Egypt, Italy, and the UK. You can find our more about Fathi here.
Nubian Warrior (2020) Mixed media on paper, 105 x 125 cm. ©Fathi Hassan, Courtesy The Sunderland Collection
In his response to items from The Sunderland Collection, Hassan explored the layered stories of the cartographic objects, reflecting on themes of displacement and global interconnectedness. The resulting works are richly textured mixed-media compositions combining collage, print, pencil, and gouache, interweaving autobiographical elements with historical references. Recurring motifs include animals from his childhood, crescent moons, and Nubian warriors, alongside symbols of migration such as the felucca boats associated with the flooding of Nubia in 1952. You can enjoy the online exhibition for Shifting Sands here.
Installed throughout the Paul Mellon Centre in the reception and public hallways, the library, seminar room and anteroom, the works invite visitors to encounter the artworks within a working research environment, creating moments of reflection within spaces used for the Centre’s research and events programmes.
An accompanying public programme will expand on these themes, including:
- Embodied Mapping, a panel discussion bringing together perspectives from art, history, sociology, and anthropology, 25 June 2026
- A workshop with Dr Sana Murrani, Associate Professor in Spatial Practice at the University of Plymouth, with interests in how maps have built, destroyed, remembered and reimagined geographies, particularly among communities that have suffered displacement and conflict.
Registration details will be announced soon.
Sacred Moon (2023) Mixed media on paper, 21 x 29.5 cm
Untitled (2023), Mixed media on paper, 56 x 65 cm
Sarah Victoria Turner, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre comments
“This exciting collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre and The Sunderland Collection is built around our shared commitment to using our collections and spaces as platforms for discovery and making new connections. We are delighted to display Fathi Hassan's work at the centre and witness the ways in which it uses cartography to make bridges between the historic and contemporary and help us reflect on questions of mapping, nation and identity.”
Beth Greenacre, curator of The Sunderland Collection’s Art Programme, says:
“This collaboration is driven by a shared belief in the power of artist-led research to connect historical objects with contemporary practice. Presenting Fathi’s work across the Centre reflects current thinking around ‘Ongoing Colonial Worlds’ and uses art to examine the conditions of occupation and unrest, as well as displacement, colonialism, memory, and identity.”
Open to the public, the Paul Mellon Centre provides a distinctive setting in which visitors can encounter Hassan’s work alongside ongoing research activity, highlighting the vital relationship between art, scholarship, and public engagement.
More information about the exhibition and public programme will be announced soon.
©Paul Mellon Centre
About the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Based in London and part of Yale University, the PMC is a research centre and educational charity. They are a place for conversation and community, for questioning and discovery.
They support the generation of ideas and promote the sharing of knowledge about British art to create better understandings of the past, present, and potential futures. We do this through grant making, programming events and activities, publishing, assembling resources for research, and creating networks.
Paul Mellon, art collector and philanthropist, founded the Centre in 1970. We are part of Yale University and a partner to the Yale Center for British Art.
Find out more by visiting paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/
