LONDON – A British artist has launched a creative campaign on Instagram to challenge misconceptions about Muslims in the British society.

“I wanted to do a project about Muslims here in the UK for a while,” Charlotte Bibby, based in London, told The National.

“When Muslims are brought up in mainstream media, they are often vilified, really stereotyped.”

Bibby is part of a growing number of creatives challenging misconceptions about Muslims in British society.

The 25-year-old started the “Reclaiming Muslim” project in 2017, an Instagram photography series telling the stories of Muslims living in the UK.

The project includes interviewing and photographing people following the Islamic faith in the UK.

The point of this project is that the most amount of people get to see it, and it changes their mind about things and opens their mind,” she said.

“Instagram is a very good platform for artists because the potential for the audience is massive.”

Using a popular social media platform, Bibby wanted to interact directly with the audience. While the majority of responses have been positive, she has faced some criticism.

“I’ve had some people say it’s not my right to do this because I’m not Muslim,” she said.

“I know a lot of the time when people take stories or experiences that belong to minorities, they take it, twist it and profit from it. Then the people get completely left out of that process.

“But the way that I’ve approached the project is elevating the voices of those people. I’m not speaking for them, they’re speaking for themselves. All I’m doing is taking images of people and putting them on Instagram.”

“I’ve decided that I won’t do anything that I don’t enjoy. My mum totally disagrees on that, she’s like “you have to do things you don’t like”, but my dream life would just be never being in a job I don’t like, being comfortable but not too comfortable and I’d love to travel. I’m assuming most people say that, to travel. I’d like to go to Singapore, Malaysia, Toronto… but I’ve decided that I wouldn’t go to the US, because I don’t want to go to somewhere where I don’t feel welcome and I feel like with someone like Trump in power I don’t feel like there’s a place for me. There are obviously Muslims living there, Muslims still travel there, but personally I don’t think I’d go there.” – January 2018 – Iman Al Jabbar (@i.xaj) is a 21 year old British graphic designer studying digital culture in at King’s College London and Junior Creative Director @supersistersmag #reclaimingmuslim

A post shared by Reclaiming “Muslim” ?? (@reclaimingmuslim) on Mar 27, 2018 at 4:33am PDT

Reclaiming Muslim is not the only project for Bibby. She also wrote a book for children with illustrator Gus Scott called Yasmin’s Journey, telling the story of an eight-year-old refugee’s treacherous voyage to safety in the UK.

“There are so many refugee children coming into Europe and they will be going to schools. The kids here will have no understanding of what their classmate might have gone through,” Bibby said.

“I thought it would be great to make a book about refugees for when I have children. Hopefully, by that time, the Syrian civil war won’t be going on. But there will always be displaced people.”