'Jameel Prize: Moving Images' At V&A: A Digital and Immersive Exhibition That Provides An Intimate Lens Into Islamic Culture, Society, And Identity
‘Moving Images’ is the theme for the seventh edition of the Jameel Prize, a contemporary art and design competition run by the V&A focused on Islamic culture. This year, the medium expands to the digital and immersive, involving photography, film, sculpture, audio, installation, animation, and virtual reality. The exhibition displays the works of seven finalists from across the globe who invite us into their personal world and experiences, spanning from societal and environmental issues, memory and history to identity. Although we see experiences of loss, destruction, and sorrow within the art, there is still a sense of hope and determination in the personal works of the artists, which uphold and celebrate Islamic tradition and culture.
As you walk through the exhibition, there is often the idea of one’s relationship with the landscape or immediate surroundings. Some artists reflect on water: Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti-Puerto-Rican-born artist, draws our attention to the loss of freshwater and severe damage to the local ecosystems in the Arabian Gulf and the wetlands of Iraq due to the oil and date palm industries and the Iraq war. Her colossal sculpture Zamzamiya imitates the public water fountains that now give desalinated water. In the shape of the earthenware vase that carries water from the holy Zamzam well in Mecca, Farid intertwines spirituality and the preciousness and gift of water, while the artificial material of the sculpture, fibreglass and resin, is a perpetual reminder of the loss of freshwater due to the oil industry. The two films in her moving-image piece Chibayish follow communities who live by the seemingly peaceful waterways but are highly polluted by, yet again, the oil industry in the marshlands at the intersection of the Euphrates and Tigris in Iraq. Yet, we witness the resilience of the young lives as they sing, dance, and swim in these waters to care for their water buffalo.
Turning to Zahra Malkani’s project, A Ubiquitous Wetness, we see the relationship between water and sound run deep in her work. Originally from Sindh, Pakistan, Malkani says she takes a special interest in the “aniconic tradition that the sonic is privileged over the visual…that the spirit moves through sound”. In one shot of her three-panelled video, Darya, Darpan, we are taken on a small wooden rowing boat in the middle of the lake, the sun is strong and shining high up in the blue clear sky as we head towards an old shrine vulnerable to the fluctuations of the water levels due to the local infrastructure. An ancient song is sung by Malkani’s hosts as we approach it, representing the deeper idea of tradition and spirituality resisting the modern systems and facilities damaging to the local environment, particularly in light of the 2022 floods back then. All Water is a Portal to All Water then invites you to sit on a cushion, put on headphones, and listen to mixed recordings and invocations while reading through beautifully printed texts.
Landscape shapes a culture and its traditions. In her photographic series Muharram, named after a holy month of the Islamic calendar, Marrim Akashi Sani presents a collection of large-print photos set over a lightbox, taken spontaneously on her walks around her home of Detroit, USA, which has a large Muslim community. In the series, the Iranian-Iraqi artist photographs interiors of homes, the back of a shop, possessions, portraits and images that show how the locals upkeep tradition and how the American landscape and culture have affected and shaped their practice. For Akashi Sani, she wants to capture all this before it ceases to exist, for she feels it is a dying tradition; the photographs, therefore, will serve as a memory of this tradition in this period of time.
In one room, projected on the wall are hand-drawn animations that reflect memories of the Netherlands-based artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji during his childhood when his mother would bake bread on the tannour, a traditional stone clay oven, in Iraq: this is A Thread of Light Between My Mother's Fingers and Heaven, which depicts his mother’s hand while various animated motifs arise and fly across, conveying the years of her hard work to look after the family. On another wall, Short Story in the Eyes of Hope merges transparent portrait stills in the centre while a hand-drawn map runs across behind them, and scribbles appear over each face; Alfraji reflects on the life of his father who used to live in the marshlands of southern Iraq before deciding to move his family for a better life. Kwaish Alfraji’s monochrome art is intimate as it looks back in memory of his parents who have worked hard and taken risks to care for the family.
In her virtual reality, memory is at the heart of the work of Syrian artist Jawa El Khash. Brought up in the Syrian capital Damascus, El Khash often visited the ancient city of Palmyra as a child, and with the civil war that has brought destruction to local ecosystems and the historical ruins, she created The Upper West Sky. This virtual reality invites you into a dreamlike world where such ecosystems flourish amongst the ruins now gone and where you can be in awe of Syria’s historical and natural landscape. Dotted along the walls opposite the VR screens, she takes us into her thought process with pieces from books, sketches, and photos of individual elements, whether jasmine or a Palmyrene arch, all of which are represented in the virtual reality.
Usually, we try to avoid keeping items we do not need, but this is not the case in the work of Khandakar Ohida, the winner of this year’s Jameel Prize. The room in the exhibition displays possessions of her uncle Khandakar Selim, a doctor who receives unwanted items from his patients and second-hand markets, from train tickets and empty perfume bottles to postcards and more. Her film Dream Your Museum revolves around her uncle, whom she films at his house. We see shots of individual objects around his home and a dreamy moment when he opens a perfume bottle, and suddenly, animated flowers float across the screen as though we are witnessing the scent spread into the atmosphere. The idea of a museum through Ohida and Selim’s eyes are contrary to the typical and colonial museum, places that neatly arrange unique and valuable historical pieces; instead, Ohida and Selim wish to open a museum that display objects typically viewed as ordinary, since to them such items hold value and are dearly personal and intimate to their lives.
In the final room, painted imaginary figures move within historical footage of statues falling down during political events of the Middle East. Three Iranian artists, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, who are based in the UAE, have created their film by printing 3000 individual pieces of paper, each with a frame of the footage, and then painted over them with creatures influenced by 13th century text on cosmography called Aja'ib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation). The movements of the vivid, colourful painted creatures are contrasted against the black and white real-life footage of the historical moments and the fallen statues, bringing a different form of life to the statues and images.
Many emotions unravel in this exhibition. The various mediums practiced by the finalists truly draw us to our human senses, emphasising all the more their own intimate feelings, memories and what they believe matters. At the same time, we find that the same ideas and thoughts emerge; we feel not necessarily complete loss, but the moment just before, that particular feeling that we might just be able to keep alive. It may be nostalgia, hope, strength, or resistance to those that are the cause of the potential loss. Moving Images is a constant flow, never static, and the artists and the people involved in their artwork demonstrate that through the tradition and spirituality of Islamic culture, they endeavor to keep their own practices alive.
Jameel Prize: Moving Images is on at the V&A South Kensington until 16th March. More info and tickets here.
Edited by Oisín McGilloway, Editor-in-Chief
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