LONDON.- The V&A and Art Jameel announce the shortlisted projects for the 7th edition of the Jameel Prize, the V&A’s international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition. The triennial competition, founded in 2009 and worth £25,000, focuses this year on moving image and digital media. The shortlisted artists for Jameel Prize: Moving Images are: Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Jawa El Khash, Alia Farid, Zahra Malkani, Khandakar Ohida, Marrim Akashi Sani, and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (as a collective). Their works engage with aspects of Islamic culture, society and ideas, and their relevance to contemporary life, covering a wide range of themes – from domesticity and spirituality to ecology and revolution.

Applicants were sought through an open call in 2023, which invited artists working with film, video, and time-based media, alongside those engaging with established and emerging digital technologies, to apply. From over 300 submissions, seven finalists were selected by an international jury comprised of artists Morehshin Allahyari and Ajlan Gharem (winner of the previous Prize, Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics), curator Sadia Shirazi, and academic Laura U. Marks, and chaired by V&A Director Tristram Hunt. The winner of the Prize will be announced on November 27, 2024, after which all the finalists’ works will be displayed at the V&A South Kensington, opening November 30, 2024. After its run at the V&A, Jameel Prize: Moving Images will go on tour in 2025 to national and international venues, including to Hayy Jameel in Jeddah.

Spanning film, sculpture, installation, sound, performance, and VR, the finalists’ works engage with issues relating to water, ecology, landscape, and spirituality, and the ways in which extractive industries and political dynamics shape the environmental and social fabric of the Middle East and South Asia. Others address the writing of history – examining the making of monuments and their deconstruction through acts of iconoclasm, and the forging of alternative approaches to museums and collections. Many works offer personal testaments to community, resilience, and connection, with hand-drawn animation and photography used for powerful storytelling.

The chair of the Jameel Prize jury, V&A Director, Tristram Hunt said, “I am delighted that we have selected such an impressive shortlist for the seventh Jameel Prize. Over the last 15 years the Prize has explored diverse responses to Islamic civilisation in many media. Over this time, too, the range of eligible work has expanded and diversified, allowing us to concentrate on digital media and the moving image for this edition. The V&A is delighted to continue its partnership with Art Jameel in creating a bold and intriguing exhibition.”

Director of Art Jameel, Antonia Carver, said: “Art Jameel began its partnership with the V&A in 2006, collaborating to transform the Islamic art galleries at the museum, before launching the Jameel Prize, to track and celebrate the enduring influence of Islamic design and traditions on the most compelling contemporary art of today. The Prize and its touring exhibitions are dynamic –innovating and growing in breadth and focus each iteration. We congratulate the stellar cohort of artists in this seventh edition of the Prize and Rachel Dedman, Jameel Curator of the Contemporary Middle East at the V&A.”

Through the past six editions, the Jameel Prize has received applications from more than 1,700 artists from over 40 countries, exhibited the work of 56 artists and designers, and toured to 18 venues globally.

The seven finalists are:

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji (Iraq, based in the Netherlands)

Sadik Alfraji’s practice is centred around storytelling, drawing upon personal and collective memory. In ‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’, the artist will show two hand-drawn animations that are devoted to his parents. This first one, A Thread of Light Between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven (2023), has at its centre Alfraji’s mother’s hand, which he describes as a sacred palm. From it flow images both mystical and mundane, including moments of their day-to-day lives in Iraq – eating together, singing together, as she feeds, protects, loves, and provides.

A Short Story in the Eyes of Hope (2023) is a biography of the artist’s father, and his search for a better life. The sound in this work is particularly important – overlaying the film are traditional burial prayers that are sung in Iraqi funerals. Shown alongside some original drawings, Alfraji’s powerful films are driven by the intimate, tactile quality of the hand-made.

Jawa El Khash (Syria, based in Canada)

The Upper Side of The Sky (2019) by Syrian artist Jawa El Khash is a 3D simulation that investigates and resurrects Syrian archaeology and ecology that has been endangered or destroyed as a result of the ongoing civil war. The visitor moves through the digital world and eco-system that El Khash has created, exploring lost architecture from the ancient desert city of Palmyra. At its core is the notion that in the digital realm such monuments – whether tangible architecture or ephemeral plant-life – might live on in an imagined world, as a form of digital archaeology. Visitors will be able to explore both daytime and nighttime versions of the world, accompanied by a display of the artist’s research.

Alia Farid (Kuwait/Puerto-Rico)

Alia Farid's works examine tensions over resources created by colonial borders in the Arabian Gulf, focussing on the impacted conditions of everyday people and cultures. Chibayish (2022 and 2023) is one such project, which emerged out of years of research and time spent with communities in the southern region of Iraq, close to the border with Kuwait. The central protagonist of the resulting film is a marshland along the Euphrates River. To navigate it, Farid documents her interactions with three young residents who live there with their families, as they herd water buffalo and describe to her the local geography, naming who is still there and who has been displaced. Notable is the environmental degradation caused by the oil industry, which the residents navigate as the destruction fundamentally transforms their home and traditions.

In a related sculptural work, Farid creates monumental versions of drinking fountains and vessels that are used across the Arabian Gulf to gather and distribute water. Historically, such receptacles were set out and maintained by individuals as a way to share water across a community. In recent years, this practice has subsided because the source of water has shifted from freshwater river resources in Iraq to desalination plants, which contribute to energy extraction and alter local ecologies. A new single version sculpture from her 2019 work, In Lieu of What Was, installed alongside the films, alludes to this history.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian (Iran, based in UAE)

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian are Iranian artists based in the UAE. The animation If I had two paths, I would choose a third (2020) explores the toppling of statues, the act of iconoclasm, and the life of the icon after that. The work assembles documentation and media coverage of key moments in Middle Eastern history – from the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran, to the start of the Iraq war in 2003 – and the role of monuments, statues, and works of art (the disfigured Iranian Modernist monument by Bahman Mohasses appears to come alive in the city theatre's basement) in these political power dynamics.

The artists refer to this style of moving image work as ‘fluid painting’: every frame is an individual print-out that has been hand-painted. These interventions reflect shifts in perspective: from fantastical creatures inspired by those found in the thirteenth century manuscript, Aja’ib Al Makhluqat to the microscopic, with details resembling microbiological growth. Icons are portrayed not as static objects, but as evolving entities. The work reflects upon the making and unmaking of power through the monument and its destruction, as well as the artists’ desire to reclaim and reframe such subject matter, to place it under a microscope.

Khandakar Ohida (India)

Khandakar Ohida is an artist from India. Her film Dream Your Museum (2022) is a portrait of her uncle, Khandakar Selim, who has built an extraordinary collection of objects and memorabilia over the last 50 years. The film documents the collection as it was displayed in his traditional mud home, which has since been torn down. The work challenges the nature of museums in the Indian context, as bastions of nationalism with little room for alternative narratives. As members of India’s Muslim community, both Selim and the artist confront the socio-political hierarchies that shape identity, offering a nuanced exploration of cultural representation and belonging. The film is accompanied by an installation of objects from Selim’s collection, which he transports in simple metal trunks. The portable museum is displayed informally, as a jumble of curious objects, intended to defy the authority, surveillance, and prohibition of touch that one finds in most museums. The artist invites us to envision a future where cultural heritage is liberated from the constraints of convention and exclusivity.

Zahra Malkani (Pakistan)

Zahra Malkani’s work brings together the sonic and the sacred, exploring how mystical and devotional practices in Pakistan intersect musical and oral traditions, in the particular context of water. Since 2019, the artist has been collecting an audio archive of devotional sounds and traditions on the Indus River and the Indian Ocean, as part of her project A Ubiquitous Wetness (2023). The work explores how these sonic practices constitute a form of resistance against the ecological and infrastructural violence being felt along the coasts and rivers of Pakistan. Malkani’s research manifests as listening sessions, performance, soundscapes, mixes, and publications – whose designs are inspired in part by the palimpsestic nature of Islamic manuscripts. A wealth of elements will be brought together in the installation in ‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’.

Marrim Akashi Sani (Iraq/Iran/USA)

Marrim Akashi Sani is an Iraqi-Iranian artist, writer, designer, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan. Her Muharram (2023) photo series subtly explores the complex and ambivalent process of adapting and assimilating, particularly in relation to religious practice. Sani’s intimate images of people, and the details of private domestic spaces that they document, capture practices around the commemoration of Muharram, a sacred month in Islam, and explore the ways in which this community has retained and evolved their faith in the American Midwest.