De poéticas a políticas

The V&A’s collection of material from the Islamic period in the Middle East is one of the best of its kind in the world. It came into being because the museum’s founders considered the art and design of the Islamic world to be an important potential source of inspiration for British designers in the nineteenth century. The Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the V&A is the main display of the museum’s collection of Islamic art and design, and the renewal of the gallery in 2006 was funded by Mohammed Jameel and his family.

To build on the success of the relaunched Jameel Gallery, and to celebrate the continuing relationship between the Islamic production of the past and the practices of artists and designers in our own time, Mohammed Jameel proposed the establishment of a Jameel Prize. Since the first edition in 2009, the Prize has been organised by the V&A with the support of Art Jameel, the Jameel family’s organisation for art and heritage. The Jameel Prize showcases the ways in which Islamic tradition remains a rich source of inspiration for contemporary artists and designers today. It responds to the spirit in which the V&A’s Islamic collections were formed, while remaining attuned to the twenty-first century.

About the artists

Jana Traboulsi

Jana Traboulsi is an artist and graphic designer from Lebanon. Her book, Kitab al-Hawamish, or Book of Margins, investigates the role of marginalia and the marginal in Arabic book production. For Traboulsi, ‘the marginal’ refers not only to the literal perimeter of the page, but to the many subtle and secondary aspects of Arabic book design that are no longer common in contemporary publishing. A rigorously researched project, Traboulsi spent a great deal of time examining historical Arabic manuscripts. One source of inspiration was the palimpsestic nature of such books, which often had a central text embedded within its own interpretation or commentary. Books were not always straightforwardly linear, as multiple texts could appear side by side.

Ajlan Gharem

Ajlan Gharem, is an artist and mathematics teacher based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His practice explores how Saudi communities understand and articulate their culture amidst globalisation and changing international power dynamics. His installation Paradise Has Many Gates is a mosque made of steel tubes and chicken wire. Built to scale, large enough to be occupied by a congregation, the mosque follows traditional form. The main space is rectangular, with a dome on its ceiling, on which sits a metal finial topped with a crescent moon. A chandelier suspended from the dome swings over the mosque floor, which is covered with carpet marking the direction of prayer. Arched windows line the perimeter and to one side is a minaret, bearing another finial, which holds speakers to convey the call to prayer, and strips of green fluorescent light.

Kallol Datta

Kallol Datta is a clothing designer from Kolkata, India. Growing up in the UAE and Bahrain, Datta was exposed to and fascinated by clothing from across West Asia and the Middle East, including North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and Korean Peninsula. The discovery of garments from all over the world in the wardrobe of his late grandfather, who travelled extensively for the UN, offered Datta a further library of global references.

Datta’s work draws inspiration from this wealth of sources. His clothing mines the shapes and silhouettes of the abaya, manteau, hanbok, hijab and caftan, among many others, and Datta uses experimental pattern-cutting techniques to create sculptural forms on the body.

Hadeyeh Badri

Hadeyeh Badri is a designer and textile artist based in Dubai, for whom weaving offers a rich creative language. Badri discovered weaving while a student at the School of the Arts Institute in Chicago, USA, and the loom quickly became the site for her exploration of love and grief.

The three weavings in Poetry to Politics pay homage to Hadeyeh’s late aunt, Shahnaz Badri. Shahnaz was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in her mid-thirties, and Hadeyeh became her carer in the final years of her life.

Sofia Karim

Sofia Karim is an architect, artist and activist based in London. Karim invites artists, campaigners and thinkers from across the world to design samosa packets that engage with local and international struggles, in protest and solidarity. The project began when Karim bought samosas from a street vendor in Dhaka. These packets are traditionally made from scrap paper, and she noticed that hers was made from court listings detailing cases between the Bangladeshi state and its citizens. When her own uncle, the photographer Shahidul Alam, was unlawfully imprisoned in Bangladesh for his activism, these everyday objects struck her as a sad portrait of the country’s broken justice system.

Golnar Adili

Golnar Adili is a multi-media artist and designer based in New York. Her practice examines aspects of her identity and family relationships, particularly through Persian language and poetry. Although Adili was born in the USA, her family returned to Iran shortly after the 1979 Revolution. Her father was swiftly exiled from the country and his family, and Adili’s early life was marked by this separation. The distance from her father, and the longing she has felt for him, infuse and inform Adili’s creative practice.

Since her father’s death in 2002, Adili has explored the archive of family documents and correspondence he left behind. This meticulous collection includes not only every letter her father received, but photocopies of each reply he sent out.

Bushra Waqas Khan

Bushra Waqas Khan lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan. Khan trained as a printmaker at the National College of Arts in Lahore, but in her current practice she creates elaborate miniature dresses. These dresses use affidavit paper, or stamp paper, as the source for their patterns. This paper is used for all official documents in Pakistan – birth, death, marriage, divorce, property, and so on. It signifies authority and ownership, and is characterised by elaborate decoration. The design of the paper’s header typically includes national emblems of Pakistan like the chaand tara (star and crescent moon), set within generic floral motifs and arabesque flourishes. The monetary value is written in English and Urdu, and the decorative elements are never perfectly symmetrical, to make the paper difficult to forge.

Farah Fayyad

Farah Fayyad is a Lebanese graphic designer currently based in Amsterdam. Fayyad’s practice is characterised by exploration of two distinct disciplines: Arabic typography and screen-printing. Her contemporary Arabic typeface is based on the historic Kufic calligraphy, which was the first calligraphic style to gain prominence in handwritten Qur’ans from the 8^th century onwards.

In her contemporary font Kufur, Fayyad echoes Kufic’s horizontal emphasis and thick strokes, capturing the bold, graphic character of the original. A challenge in Arabic type design is to program digital typefaces to behave in the complex ways a hand-written calligraphic script does.

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