Jacob England’s ‘Souk of the Dispossessed’ is a poignant culmination of his wider collection, Dissonance and Harmony, a body of work that interrogates Western romanticisation of Middle Eastern culture through the lens of class struggle and conflict. Working with oil portraiture and pattern printing, England disrupts the aestheticised gaze typically cast over the Arabic ‘Souk,’ rendering it instead as a lived space of survival, resilience, and tension.

At the heart of his practice lies a deep commitment to championing the working-class experience within Middle Eastern conflict zones. Through richly textured canvases and hand-printed interventions, he repositions the Souk not as a place of exotic commerce, but as a site where displaced Palestinian civilians often sell their last possessions to sustain themselves. These stories – visually reimagined – reject the ornamental and instead centre urgency, loss, and strength.

Souk of the Dispossessed is England’s 2025 final installation piece: a hauntingly beautiful yet politically charged multi-faceted work that collapses nostalgia and consumer fantasy into hard reality. In doing so, England invites viewers to confront their own perceptions — and complicity — within a global culture industry that often overlooks the human cost behind its images.