![\"\"](\"/static/32effd41caf7b5da35c709aaa03d0df8/12c0d/Mouayed-Bashir.png)
Image credit: Mohannad Bashir
Britain is obsessed with memorialisation. Yet we have no physical, collective public memorial for victims of state violence. Suyin Haynes explores what that might look like.
\n","content":"\n“Never forget, never forgive” has been a guiding phrase for Mohannad Bashir for the last five years. It inspired the title of a song that Mohannad’s band, Torchbearer, wrote as a tribute to his brother, Mouayed. The brothers shared a love of music: Mohannad is a bass player, while Mouayed’s musical tastes ranged from traditional Sudanese music to hip-hop.
\n\n\n\nIn February 2021, 29-year-old Mouayed suffered from a mental health episode, and died after police restraint in front of his parents in his family home in Newport, South Wales. For the first two years following Mouayed’s death, Mohannad says he and his family were lost.
\n\n\n\n“We’re in this chaos of trying to grieve, and we’re still angry,” he tells me. Alongside this, Mohannad and his family had to grapple with the legal aftermath of his brother’s death, with a two week inquest concluding in February 2024. The family held annual anniversary marches, but as time passed, Mohannad felt a pull to remember his brother in a more creative way. “Being a musician, I realised that I could turn it around and use a different platform.”
\n\n\nWriting a tribute song was one way that Mohannad channeled his grief with the support of his bandmates. Whenever he is performing on stage now, he makes sure to display a Sudanese flag with Mouayed’s picture on his guitar rig in a nod to his pride in his heritage. “That’s how I always have Mouayed with me, wherever I go,” he says. “It’s a personal way that I try to let people know what happened to my brother, and have Mouayed’s name mentioned over and over again.”
\n\n\n\nMohannad, who now runs the Justice4Mouayed campaign, and I first met online last year. I was working with the charity INQUEST, which supported his family after Mouayed’s death and is the only charity in the UK providing expertise on state-related deaths and their investigation. Throughout 2025 and early 2026, we have been part of a group working with the charity to explore questions around memorialisation. The group is made up of bereaved family members, such as Mohannad, and people including myself working on grief, heritage and holding state power to account.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“No physical, collective public memorial to those that have died at the hands of the state exists here. There is no official recognition of these numbers, nor the individual lives and stories behind each one”
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The questions we set out to explore have no easy answers. What is a memorial? What would a public memorial for victims of state violence look like? How might we define state violence and neglect, and how can we meaningfully remember those who have died in these circumstances? And what does public memorialising mean in a context where the state would prefer that its own narrative prevails?
\n\n\n\nAs of March 2026, 1,954 people have died in and following police contact in England and Wales since 1990. Police contact is one aspect of state violence that INQUEST monitors; the charity also works with families who have lost loved ones in immigration detention, mental health and learning disability settings, and in disasters where public and corporate bodies have failed to protect peoples’ health and safety.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBritain is a nation obsessed with memorialising and romanticising the past in very overt and public ways, whether that is through the numerous built memorials and statues that line our streets, or ritualistic events and ceremonies like Remembrance Sunday. Yet no physical, collective public memorial to those that have died at the hands of the state exists here. There is no official recognition of these numbers, nor the individual lives and stories behind each one.
\n\n\n\n“I was getting more and more annoyed each time I saw a war memorial,” says Naomi Oppenheim, who is the Heritage Project Manager at the charity, and worked with our group on the project. “It’s not that people who die at war shouldn’t be commemorated, but there’s this deep seated inequality of this idea of whose life and whose death gets remembered.”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“I was getting more and more annoyed each time I saw a war memorial. It’s not that people who die at war shouldn’t be commemorated, but there’s this deep seated inequality regarding whose death gets remembered”
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For Mo Mansfield, who works closely with bereaved families as INQUEST’s Family Engagement Coordinator, one of the reasons for doing this memorialisation work is to recognise the lifelong impact that such premature and preventable deaths have on families. “We wanted to think of it both in terms of a big public project, and also how people have these practices in terms of their own families,” says Mansfield. “It shows the life lost, and how the family is dealing with it twenty, thirty, forty years after the headlines have gone away, if there are any headlines at all.”
\n\n\n\nThis matters for Susan Alexander, a bereaved mother and artist based in London, who works across painting, lino printing, sewing, collage and other media. Susan’s son, Azelle Rodney, was a talented footballer and about to become a father when he was fatally shot by a police firearms officer in 2005. He was 24 years old. “I was always saying the police are there to protect and serve the community,” Susan says. “But when that happened… you’re asking for answers, you’re asking questions and you’re not getting no answers.”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver coffee on a sunny March afternoon, we talk about what a memorial could look like. Susan imagines an umbrella-like structure created from metal or stone. “We do need a meeting place. It could be a place where people can leave flowers, and then the public would get involved,” she says. We talk about the possibility of an artwork being installed on the Fourth Plinth, in Trafalgar Square. “I think it’s good to have something public to see, because people don’t see us,” she says. “Then the public will be aware of who we are. I think that’s a good start.”
\n\n\n\nThat awareness is important to other campaign groups who have also been affected by state violence and neglect in different ways. In November last year, the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that it would work with bereaved families, volunteers and heritage experts to preserve London’s National Covid Memorial Wall, which was started by bereaved family members and campaigners in 2021. It stretches half a mile along the South Bank and is covered in hearts with the names of the bereaved, including Naomi Fulop’s mother, Christina.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“We do need a meeting place. It could be a place where people can leave flowers, and then the public would get involved. I think it’s good to have something public to see, because people don’t see us”
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Standing outside Dorland House in Paddington where the Covid-19 inquiry has concluded its final day of evidence, Naomi shows me a laminated photograph of her mother Christina, who left school at 14 during World War II, completed her qualifications during night school and then went on to become a university professor. “She broke glass ceilings before they were called glass ceilings,” says Naomi, who is a member of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group. Christina died of Covid-19 in January 2021, and was cared for at home by domiciliary care workers who had inadequate PPE. For Naomi, the memorial’s significance lies in the fact that it is opposite Parliament. Alongside its function as a tribute to loved ones, its physical presence near the UK’s centre of political power is a way of holding the state to account. “It’s a reminder to our national decision makers that they are responsible for ensuring that we don’t have to have another Memorial Wall,” says Naomi.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThat sense of a physical memorial acting as a visual reminder is also important for survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. Sandra Ruiz’s niece Jessica died in the fire, and Sandra has since been an active member of the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission. She has called for a permanent memorial both to remember the communities lost loved ones, and to act “as a reminder of a national tragedy that can never be allowed to be repeated”. Speaking with our group, she shared how the Commission has visited other sites memorialising victims of tragedies, including at Aberfan, Hillsborough and the 9/11 memorial in New York. Planning permission for the Grenfell memorial is expected to be submitted by the end of 2026.
\n\n\n\nThere is a complexity inherent in building a public memorial that rallies against the harms of the state. Doing so requires approval or funding from the very authorities, councils and state bodies that may need to be held accountable.
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For some, there’s also a tension in whether such physical memorials can have aesthetic appeal. “How can you attract people and tell them about [these issues] in a way that’s interesting, that actually pulls people in? You can do that by making it beautiful, but at the same time, we’re not in the realm of beauty in that sense when we’re talking about state violence,” says Vikki Bell who is a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmith’s, University of London.
At sites globally, memorialisation and art have been intentionally combined, or perhaps have unintentionally collided, becoming forms of both public spectacle and artistic engagement. These include Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, the Statue of Peace memorials dedicated to victims of sexual slavery in Seoul and around the world, and Hank Willis Thomas’ sculptural memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in Boston, titled The Embrace.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“There is a complexity inherent in building a public memorial that rallies against the harms of the state. Doing so requires approval or funding from the very state bodies that may need to be held accountable”
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Such questions may also be on the mind of Khaleb Brooks, the artist commissioned by London’s mayor Sadiq Khan to create a memorial to victims of transatlantic slavery. Titled ‘The Wake’ and set to be unveiled in 2027, the sculpture will be located outside London Museum Docklands, in a space where a statue of enslaver Robert Milligan once stood.
\n\n\n\nVikki’s work focuses on how artists have responded to or memorialised state violence across Latin America, particularly in Argentina, where artists have memorialised the violence of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. She shares how artists have reimagined and reinterpreted physical spaces that were used during the military regime, transforming them into arts spaces, such as at the clandestine detention and torture centre Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA). After much debate, the centre’s building and structure has remained unchanged, but it is now home to a permanent museum and exhibition based on the narratives of survivors of state terrorism. It also hosts temporary exhibitions drawing on the themes of the centre’s dark past. Bell says that art spaces such as this can have a different impact than memorials. “It’s more ruminative, and a completely different experience that you’re offering.”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen our group first came together in early 2025, we were each asked to bring an example of memorials that moved and inspired us, or a memorialisation practice of our own. I shared a practice from my Chinese Malaysian family heritage and culture, where we burn joss paper with images of objects, or paper money, in remembrance of our loved ones with the idea that they can then access these objects in the afterlife: cars, tea, oranges, televisions and more everyday items.
\n\n\n\nI wondered in the meeting whether I had misinterpreted the task, as some members of our group shared physical monuments that had resonated with them. Yet there are also many other ways of memorialisation that aren’t physical monuments, often practiced by Indigenous and global majority communities.
\n\n\n\nIn Colombia, Vikki Bell tells me, many families have a significant relationship with water and landscapes as part of their memorialisation practices, as the bodies of victims of enforced disappearances were often thrown into rivers. For Māori communities in New Zealand, the wānanga oral tradition is a way of collective remembering that centres Indigenous, tribal perspectives in the memorialisation of colonial-era atrocities. The traditional Zulu cultural practice of isicathamiya, an acapella song performance accompanied by synchronised movements, was a method of expressing resistance against injustice in apartheid South Africa and has since endured as an act of remembrance. As Mohannad and I reflected on our time as part of the group, we realised that our understandings of what it means to memorialise have shifted.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“There’s a really important distinction between memorial as a noun, and memorialisation as a verb”
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He says: “I do love statues, and I do love sculptures, but how’s that going to benefit the locals?”… It’s just one piece of work that’s going to be there, but being at an event, it’s memorable, it will stay with you forever, it’s the experience.”
\n\n\n\nThere’s a really important distinction between memorial as a noun, and memorialisation as a verb, says Naomi Oppenheim, with the latter being a more active, ongoing effort and process. She says our work over the past year has challenged her understanding of what memorialisation is too. “It has made me question more this desire for the big grand memorial, and what meaning or value that actually brings.”
\n\n\n\nFor both Susan and Mohannad, the last year has also brought an opportunity to try out different types of memorialisation practices in the form of public events. Both received funding from INQUEST to organise and host events in memory of Azelle and Mouayed. Susan held an event in her local library last spring on Azelle’s 20th anniversary, where she hosted a breakfast, arranged a display of archival materials, and showcased the trailer for the documentary she has been working on with Azelle’s cousin.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMohannad hosted an energetic weekender at The Cab music venue in Newport in October, bringing together spoken word artists, panel discussions about deaths in custody in Wales, punk musical performances and family-friendly artistic workshops. “There is no faith in the state anymore, because it failed. It keeps failing every time, and it’s hurting families in various ways,” says Mohannad. “But I definitely have more faith in humanity. I realised that people actually care.”
\n\n\n\nOur work included a survey in which bereaved families responded with their ideas of what memorialisation looked like. Reading the responses, I was deeply moved by how varied and intimate these practices were, from wearing a specific pattern of clothing every day, to holding an annual event, to commemorating a loved one through plaques and physical space. In all, the memorialisation practices were connected by an unwavering determination to remember.
\n\n\n\n“It’s been five years since the loss of Mouayed, and it doesn’t get easier. But we’ll never forget what happened,” says Mohannad. “I’ll promise, as long as I’m alive, I’ll do my bit to speak the truth and share what happened to my brother and other families out there.”
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStay in touch. Subscribe to Skin Deep’s monthly newsletter.
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