Three Colours Green
William Morris Gallery, 2025

Three Colours Green, a film trilogy by Shahed Saleem with filmmaker James Wainman for the William Morris Gallery. The films accompany the Gallery’s 2024/5 exhibition showcasing William Morris’s collection of Islamic objects, offering a contemporary artistic response to the material and intellectual encounters that shaped Morris’s creative practice.

Saleem’s premise—developed both in the films and in his chapter for Tulips and Peacocks, the book published alongside the exhibition—is that while the Muslim world served as a rich site of imaginative projection for Morris and his Victorian contemporaries, it continues to function as an imagined space for Muslim diasporic communities today. In Morris’s time, the Islamic world was accessed primarily through selective lenses: fragments of ornament, translated texts, travel writing, and the visual language of objects. These partial encounters generated a powerful, if romanticised, domain of creativity, desire, and idealised cultural connection.

For Muslims living in diaspora in the contemporary West, Saleem argues, the imaginative relationship is different but no less potent. The “Muslim world” operates today as a space shaped by memory, affect, and longing—a terrain constructed through family histories, inherited narratives, disrupted geographies, and the search for belonging across distance. This diasporic imaginary is inevitably more entangled than the Victorian one: it is layered with lived experience, political realities, and the complexities of cultural hybridity. Yet it remains animated by hopes, ideals, and aspirations that exceed geographical borders.

Three Colours Green explores these ideas through a visual and narrative language that moves between material culture, place, poetic reflection, and contemporary identity. Saleem’s approach positions imagination not as escapism but as a generative mode of cultural continuity and re-invention—an active process through which diasporic communities negotiate their relationships to heritage, loss, and possibility.

Taken together, the trilogy and accompanying essay offer a new perspective on the cross-cultural dynamics that sit at the heart of the exhibition. Saleem reframes Morris’s own engagement with the Islamic world, not only as a historical curiosity but as part of a longer lineage of imaginative exchange—one that continues to unfold in the lives and cultural practices of Muslim diasporas today.