The exhibition for the Jameel Prize titled “Poetry to Politics” launched at the London-based Victoria & Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery in early September 2021. The triennial Jameel Prize is the world’s leading award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition, presenting by the V&A in partnership with Art Jameel. This year the Prize has started a new era by introducing a thematic focus to the award, with the sixth edition in 2021 dedicated solely to contemporary design. “Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics” is curated by the V&A’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Rachel Dedman, in collaboration with V&A Senior Curator for the Middle Eastern Collection, Tim Stanley.
The exhibition displays the work of the eight finalists who were shortlisted for the prize from over 400 applications: Golnar Adili, Hadeyeh Badri, Kallol Datta, Farah Fayyad, Sofia Karim, Jana Traboulsi, Bushra Waqas Khan, and the prize winner Ajlan Gharem.
The international jury for “Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics”, which selected the shortlist and the winner, includes V&A Director Tristram Hunt as jury chairperson, the joint-winners of Jameel Prize 5, Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar and Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, as well as British author and design critic Alice Rawsthorn and Emirati writer, researcher and Founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi.
Hailing from India, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, the shortlisted designers’ diverse practices span graphic design and fashion, typography and textiles, installation and activism. The finalists’ works engage with both the personal and the political, interpreting the past in creative and critical ways, while addressing global events and lived realities, and the legacies of language, architecture and craft.
The winner of the sixth edition of the Jameel Prize Ajlan Gharem was announced on 15 September 2021 and received the GBP25,000 prize from Fady Jameel, Chairman and Founder of Art Jameel, at a virtual ceremony on Wednesday 15 September 2021. The Saudi designer was selected by the jury for his architectural installation Paradise Has Many Gates (2015), which was commended for its boldness and ambition. At the V&A, there is a life-size recreation of the mosque’s dome alongside large-scale photographic prints and a video. V&A Director Tristam Hunt said of the Jameel Prize winner:
… Gharem’s work is notable for its innovative use of material and ambitious scale. The transparent wire frame references border fencing but has the effect of demystifying the mosque for non-Muslim viewers. We also commend the use of the installation as a space for cross-cultural connection and community gathering.
Born in 1985 in the conservative southern city of Khamis Mushayt in Saudi Arabia, Ajlan Gharem received a BA in Mathematics at King Khalid University and continues to apply his analytical training to his multidisciplinary art practice.Now based in Riyadh, he works as a teacher of Mathematics at Al Sahabah Public School. Gharem is a co-founder of Gharem Studio along with his brother, internationally renowned artist Abdulnasser Gharem.
Through his multidisciplinary practice, Ajlan Gharem explores how Saudis articulate their culture, and particularly how Saudi culture might be influenced by the transformations induced by the world’s increasing globalisation and constantly changing power dynamics. Exploring the phenomenon within a climate of rapid development across the Gulf region, and specifically under the lens of an ever cautious Saudi response, Gharem aims to focus on the fragile balance of power between the individual and the state, and on his generation’s ability to generate change, within a sometimes stagnating and strictly conservative environment.
His winning installation Paradise Has Many Gates (2015) is true to the design and function of a traditional mosque, and is made of the chicken wire used for border walls and refugee detention centres. The material itself and the cage-like structure provoke feelings of imprisonment and anxiety, reminding us of the widespread mass migration and refugee crises of our contemporary times. At the same time, the material also renders the mosque transparent, open to both the outsider’s gaze and to the elements. While questioning the role of religion in society, Gharem challenges the political authority that can underpin religion through the transparency of the structure. Through the absence of walls, the artist also seeks to demystify Islamic prayer for non-Muslims, tackling the fear of the other at the heart of Islamophobia.
Gharem opens the installation to everyone, regardless of religious background or affiliation, creating a space for communal sharing. The artist first erected Paradise Has Many Gates in the desert one hour’s drive from the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh for only one day before taking it down. In 2018, the installation was part of the Vancouver Biennale, where it was a stage for intercultural dialogue and collaboration.
London-based British architect, artist and activist Sofia Karim presents a work that also speaks of Islamophobia today, and specifically in India. Karim was shorlisted for the Jameel Prize for her Turbine Bagh project, which imagines Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as a stand-in for Shaheen Bagh, the neighbourhood in Delhi where mass protests against the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act took place in December 2019.
The Act offers amnesty to immigrants from three neighbouring countries to India, but excludes Muslims. This move is part of an alarming rise in Islamophobic attitudes and legislation in India, as Karim says: “What we are witnessing is a vast and historic civil rights movement against fascism, Hindu nationalism and caste oppression.”
With this project, Karim invited artists and thinkers from across the world to engage with the struggle by designing samosa packets for Shaheen Bagh. Karim’s installation of samosa packets and textiles is on display at the Jameel Prize exhibition. The work charges these humble, everyday objects with political significance, bringing attention to the ongoing human rights crisis in India.
Engaging with traditional clothing design, Kolkata-based designer Kallol Datta presents a series of designs inspired by clothing from North Africa and West Asia, an interest that emerged during a childhood spent in the UAE and Bahrain.
The discovery of a Senegalese caftan in his grandfather’s wardrobe motivated his subsequent research into garment traditions from across the region, the Indian subcontinent and the Korean peninsula. For Datta “Clothes-making is an exercise in anthropology … ”, acknowledging the power of clothing to challenge social norms and channel personal expression.
Datta is interested in the gestures of enveloping, swaddling, wrapping and layering, which are at the basis of various contemporary fashion configurations like those of the abaya, manteau, hanbok, hijab and caftan. The designer approaches pattern-cutting with experimental techniques, going beyond traditional geometry in order to create sculptural silhouettes that come to life on the body.
At “Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics”, three of Datta’s bold looks are on display alongside photographs the designer commissioned from photographer colleagues in India. Two black-and-white photographs hang each between two of Datta’s textile models. On the left, the photograph entitled Object 8, showing a man dressed in a traditionally inspired outfit, sits between two bright blue pieces, Karate Gi and Shroud, both featuring a total veiled look. On the right is Ghost, a photograph of a seated person with a completely covered face, sitting next to a textile model in bright red and pink.
The connection between tradition and modernity, and a not-so-veiled commentary on the socio-political realities in the Islamic world, are enhanced by the vibrant constrast between the black-and-white and the bold colours.
On show at the V&A Jameel Prize is also another beautiful dress, albeit a miniature one that differs from Datta’s work in technique, materials and outcome. Lahore printmaker Bushra Waqas Khan is known for the extraordinary garments she designs and makes in miniature. However, the catalyst for her creations is not the traditional textile, but rather affidavit paper, or oath paper, used for official documents in Pakistan. There is a special significance to the use of this kind of paper in her work, as affidavit paper is a symbol of national authority as well as traditional Islamic culture, often carrying national emblems like the star and crescent alongside motifs and patterns from Islamic art and design. The paper also signifies authority and ownership, something that is kept safe over generations, as it is also used for printing and signing contracts of various kinds.
Khan started combining etching and printmaking — which recalled the processes of manufacturing the affidavit stamp — with pattern-cutting and embroidery, to create miniature garments of her own design. The Jameel Prize exhibition features Khan’s first dress. The miniature is just 50 cm tall and is a nod to colonial influences on dress making in South Asia, as well as to the presence of Islamic design in Pakistan’s everyday life.
Another finalist working with textiles is Dubai-based designer and fibre artist Hadeyeh Badri, who maintains that textiles’ rich creative language unites gesture, touch, memory and ritual. Badri uses weaving as if she was writing on paper. The three complex weavings on show in the Jameel Prize exhibition all incorporate writing into the body of the fabric. Badri’s works nod to the legacy of the Jacquard loom in the invention of coding algorithms.
However, the coolness and detachment of an algorithmic relationship is substituted by a more intimate, materic, sensual one. Badri uses texts that are personal, taken from the diary of her late aunt. The weaving is a way of reconnecting with her aunt, and calls upon a trope in pre-Islamic poetry, al-wuquf ‘ala al-atlal (‘standing by the ruins’), in which a poet visits a site of mourning or of architectural decay and reanimates its history through language. Badri hints at the notion that weavings may act as personal monuments, ones that remain deliberately partial and under construction.
We have seen how the Pakistani designer uses her printmaking techniques and paper for purposes other than those traditionally ascribed to the medium and material. Lebanese graphic designer Jana Traboulsi presents a work that instead nods to the traditional production of paper-based media. Her artist book Kitab al-Hawamish (Book of Margins) (2017) investigates margins and marginalia in Arabic manuscript production. Traboulsi has extensively conducted research into Middle Eastern traditions of book-making, and is particularly interested in exploring those aspects of manuscript practices that are often considered secondary elements to the central text, such as diacritics, Sura markers, the index and catchwords.
During her research, she came upon a ‘scar’ in an ancient piece of parchment, the result of stitching the animal skin close. The text was written around the scar. This discovery inspired the artist to place an emphasis on the materiality of the book as form. Traboulsi’s interest in the marginal elements of manuscript production also extend to vocal recitation of texts: how language is formed and experienced in the body, from concept formation in the brain to vocalisation starting from the diaphragm, to the larynx and mounth. In “Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics”, Traboulsi presents extracts of the book reproduced in the form of supergraphics, alongside copies of the original manuscript.
Another Lebanese graphic designer presents work focused on typography and screenprinting. Farah Fayyad, who is also a printmaker, is fascinated by Arabic calligraphy and lettering, and has designed a contemporary Arabic typeface called Kufur, based on historic Kufic script, which retains the original visual element while also adapting it for digital use.
Fayyad also runs a small press in Beirut, and makes screen prints. During the 2019 protests against government corruption and the growing economic crisis, she set up a screen-printing intervention.
She and her colleagues transported a manual press in the heart of the protest locations, and offered free priting onto the clothing of protestors of slogans and artworks by local designers. In this way, Fayyad brought Arabic typography out into the public and political sphere, contributing to a critical moment in Lebanese contemporary history.
Lastly, we take a look at New York-based, Iranian multimedia artist and designer Golnar Adili who uses Persian language and poetry to explore aspects of her identity and personal history, marked by separation, uprootedness and longing in her early life in post-revolution Tehran. Her work Ye Harvest from the Eleven-Page Letter (2016) explores a letter from her father, who was exiled from Iran when Adili was young, to his lover.
Adili transforms her father’s love letter into a spatial installation, highlighting his use of one single letter from the Persian alphabet — ye — and making it the central motif of her work. The three-dimensional installation encodes the two-dimensional letter by reproducing the idiosyncrasies of her father’s handwriting, and the distance between each ye. The installation is “both monumental and delicate”, as the curators write, and pays homage to her father, abstracting and obscuring the emotional content of his communication.
From architecture and textiles, to calligraphy, books and typography, the Jameel Prize features a diverse range of design production that cross over to contemporary art, presenting a deeply conceptual engagement with personal and collective memories and histories. Exploring and engaging with Islamic traditions in different ways, the eight designers allow us to get acquainted with or revisit aspects of the social, cultural and political history of the Islamic world.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics” is on view from 18 September to 28 November 2021 at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery, London, UK.