Water and ecology are recurring themes. Several artists explore the relationship between landscape, spiritual traditions and the ways industrialisation impacts the environment and alters the social fabric of the Middle East and South Asia. Others address the writing of history by examining the destruction of monuments and by forging alternative approaches to museums and collections. Reflecting the enduring power of the hand-made alongside digital technology, the exhibition presents artists as storytellers.
The Jameel Prize: Moving Images exhibition will be on display at V&A South Kensington from 30 November 2024 – 16 March 2025, and is free. The jury will announce the winner of the £25,000 prize on 27 November 2024. After its run at the V&A, the exhibition will go on tour.
The finalists
Khandakar Ohida
Khandakar Ohida's Dream Your Museum (2022) is a film about the artist's uncle, Khandakar Selim, and his collection of more than 12,000 objects amassed over the past 50 years. From train tickets, perfume bottles and cameras, to ceramics, postcards and photographs, Selim sees value in things others discard. Khandakar's film documents her uncle's collection as it was displayed in their traditional mud house in West Bengal, India, which has since been torn down.
The work challenges the formal nature of museums in India, particularly as bastions of nationalism that offer little room for alternative narratives. Dream Your Museum counters the colonial museum model, instead inviting people to find value in the seemingly banal objects that are an intrinsic part of their lives. The film reflects Ohida and Selim's yearning for an open, community museum which reflects diverse social and cultural identities and the experiences of minorities in India.
Jawa El Khash
Syrian artist Jawa El Khash is fascinated by the freedom of digital world-building. Made using virtual reality and 3D simulation software, The Upper Side of the Sky is an interactive digital world designed around Syrian archaeology and nature.
The project was inspired by the artist's experience of growing up in Damascus, Syria, and her memories of visiting the ancient ruins of Palmyra. The Upper Side of the Sky is structured around Palmyrene architecture – arcades, courtyard and temples – animated with examples of Syrian biodiversity, such as apple and olive trees, wheat, corn and jasmine.
The violence of Syria's ongoing civil war, which started in 2011, endangers local ecosystems and has led to the destruction of historic architecture. In El Khash's work, the virtual realm becomes a serene site for the celebration of Syria's rich history and the centuries that Palmyra has witnessed and survived.
Alia Farid
Alia Farid is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist. Through film and sculpture, she explores relationships to water and the impact of ecological violence on communities in the Gulf. Chibayish consists of two films, made in 2022 and 2023, which focus on the Iraqi wetlands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. They record the artist's interactions with young marsh residents as they care for their water buffalo, name members of their community, swim, sing and navigate a landscape heavily polluted by the oil industry.
Zamzamiya is a sculpture inspired by public ma'a sabeel (water fountains) which are traditionally commissioned by individuals as a way of making water available to their community. As desalination plants, which convert saltwater into drinking water, have increasingly replaced rivers as Iraq's primary source of water, local ecologies are under threat and sabeels now dispense desalinated water. Zamzamiya reflects the idea of water as a gift, literally and metaphorically.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian are Iranian artists based in the United Arab Emirates. This work revolves around acts of iconoclasm, of imagery documenting the toppling of political statues in the Middle East, from the 1953 military coup in Iran to the start of the Iraq War in 2003.
News footage of these events is overlaid with strange images – by fantastical creatures inspired by Aja'ib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation), a 13th-century text on cosmography, and by forms resembling bacteria seen under a microscope.
The artists call this style of work 'fluid painting', with the film being made from over 3000 individual pieces of paper, printed and hand-painted in turn. This is partly inspired by the philosophy of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. The painting creates a curtain-like veil over the subject matter, forcing viewers to see the images from a new perspective.
Marrim Akashi Sani
Marrim Akashi Sani is an Iranian-Iraqi artist from Detroit, USA. Detroit is a city with a large Muslim population, shaped by waves of historic and contemporary immigration from across the Middle East. Akashi Sani is interested in the hybridity of Islam, ways in which the nuances of religious practices and traditions are changing in the North American context.
Her photo series Muharram, named for a holy month of the Islamic calendar, documents her local community during this time – their public and private rituals and personal religious expression. Walking through the city with her camera in her handbag, Akashi Sani works spontaneously, making intimate portraits of people and places, capturing the details of domestic interiors and the back rooms of shops. Her images explore the ways in which a diverse Muslim community has kept and evolved its faith in the American Midwest.
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji is an Iraqi artist based in the Netherlands. His practice is focussed on storytelling, particularly around themes of identity and migration. The hand-drawn animations shown in the Jameel Prize are devoted to the artist's parents.
A Short Story in the Eyes of Hope is a biography of the artist's father who grew up in the marshes of southern Iraq before leaving to seek a better life for himself and his family.
A Thread of Light Between My Mother's Fingers and Heaven has at its centre Alfraji's mother's hand, which he describes as a sacred palm. From it flow images inspired by the artist's memories of growing up in Iraq – the family eating and singing together, as his mother nurtures and watches over them. Both films are reflective of the personal, intimate nature of Alfraji's work.
Zahra Malkani
Zahra Malkani's work brings together the sonic and the sacred in Pakistan. Since 2019, she has been building an audio archive through research with communities living along the Indus River and on the coast of the Indian Ocean. Malkani is from Sindh, a region where the waterways have a strong devotional and mystical character. She explores how spiritual practices, in the form of music, prayer, chant and anthem, are rooted in local landscapes and ecologies.
Sindhi oral and musical traditions are also deeply connected to local activism. From fisherfolk fighting the corporate purchase of sacred islands, to campaigners protesting against commercial developments that cause devastating floods, Malkani presents sonic practices as a form of resistance against the ecological violence being felt along the coasts and rivers of Pakistan.
The jury
- Dr Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A (Chair)
- Morehshin Allahyari, artist and Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art, Stanford University
- Ajlan Gharem, artist and winner of Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics, 2021
- Sadia Shirazi, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of South Asian art, architecture and visual culture, University of British Columbia
- Laura U. Marks, Grant Strate University Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
