Karim Sultan on The Places We Know
Karim Sultan joined Bethlem Gallery in 2025. Karim is responsible for exhibitions, artist development and programmes at the gallery and alongside the team.
Bethlem Gallery (BG): We’d love to share with our readers more about the Gallery’s spring 2026 exhibition that you’ve worked on. What can you tell us about it?
Karim Sultan (KS): Our current exhibition is focused on Bethlem Gallery’s new collection, launched last year. But rather than myself or an external curator selecting from it and coming up with the interpretation, we wanted to work with an artist. An artist who was not only active in the Gallery’s community but also represented in the collection.
BG: What inspired your approach? And who did you choose?
KS: The co-curator of the show is artist, writer, and educator Halimah Zakiuddin. Halimah is a painter of nature, architecture, and abstract works. She also enjoys making art with a variety of other materials. By inviting Halimah to be a curator of this exhibition, it automatically presents a very different perspective, something that you might not normally see. It’s also rare for an artist from within a collection to have the opportunity to curate it.
BG: So, what’s unique about Halimah’s selection and collection, as a Bethlem Gallery collection artist, that visitors can discover in the exhibition?
KS: First, one of the things that is especially striking is a sense of familiarity that emerges, and in fact, this is what has inspired the title of the exhibition, The Places We Know. So, rather than looking at a work and being like, “Oh, that’s interesting, I like the idea, or the use of light, or the composition.” With this, it’s more like, “I know this person – oh, yeah, this, I know this place”. What Halimah has selected, in some respects, led to an exhibition that is a kind of social event, an opportunity to get to know the people behind the works in the collection. This has been a very new experience of collaboration for me, and the experience of exploring the collection in this way with Halimah has been a joyful one.
BG: You mentioned earlier that you have also been thinking about exhibition interpretation. How have you approached this?
KS: Yes, in addition to working with Halimah, we wanted to interrupt our usual “gallery voice”. We have invited actor, filmmaker, poet, and Creative Future writer-in-residence Jess Murrain, to act as our ‘exhibition poet’.
BG: What does Jess bring to the exhibition?
KS: So, there is a kind of parallel universe happening now in the exhibition, between the worlds of visual art, theatre and film. There are similar concerns, but also areas of difference, around, for example, this idea of ‘time’.
Every moment that you’re on the stage, or you’re looking at a moving image on a screen, there is a narrative evolving in real time before you that we as the audience take in. With visual art and in exhibitions, the works on display are often still. You, as the visitor, create your own sense of time as you stand in front of them.
This difference in how to deal with time posed an interesting creative question, where she wondered, ‘How do I interrupt this?’
BG: How does she? Can visitors participate in the interpretation of the exhibition, somehow?
KS: Yes! We’d love visitors to do this. As you walk through the exhibition, you’ll have a chance to respond to several questions that Halimah and I developed, placed across three plinths in the gallery space. Jess will be introducing more layers in response as the exhibition evolves.
BG: What responses have you received so far?
KS: Oh, so many, some straightforward, some unexpected and very creative. Two NHS colleagues who came to the opening told us about their visit. They said, ‘oh we are having such an amazing time. We’ve basically walked slowly around the exhibition talking about our lives, pausing in front of each artwork, but not intentionally meaning to – it just happened!’
The Places We Know: Selected Works From The Bethlem Gallery Art Collection, 4 February – 11 April 2026, free entry