The Jameel Prize: Moving Images – exhibition at the V&A
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Beyond the V&A’s ornate and magnificently high-ceilinged walls lie an extraordinary wealth of historical and cultural displays. Indeed, you’d best plan your day around just one exhibition, or you’ll be there all week! And why not plan that visit around the Jameel Prize: Moving Images award for artists and designers inspired by Islamic history and culture. This seventh edition features the work of seven finalists working in moving image and digital media, with striking forays into animation and virtual reality but also non-moving image cultural remarks on photography, sculpture, and sound.
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You’ll notice the first moving image piece you meet in the front gallery does not actually move! Zamzamiya by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid, is the display’s centrepiece sculpture – it’s a public drinking fountain in the shape of a traditional earthenware drinking vessel. Such vase-like fountains are a common sight in the Gulf states. The work speaks of deeper concerns around the provision and availability of water resources; not just for drinking, but ablution, agriculture and animal feed. In the same room, her two films, amalgamously titled Chibayish, focus on Iraq’s once rich natural heritage. Its wetlands were the largest in Asia before the ecological devastation and negligence that followed the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990 Gulf War. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zamzamiya by Alia Farid
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Marrim Akashi Sani’s large-scale photo series Muharram is a stirring capture of family and community life. Although born in Detroit, USA, her Iranian-Iraqi heritage is the proud and resonant focus in these intimate portraits. She documents the changes to the immigrant community’s way of life in North America through the generations. Syrian artist Jawa El Khash’s imagined digital world, The Upper Side of the Sky, looks a little like a video game and invites visitors to navigate this brave new world from an interactive play station. Well, it’s not exactly a new world. Based around reconstructed Palmyrene architecture, it reimagines this simulacrum from memory with the digital construct springing from these heritage ruins. Is it interactive? You’re not sure whether to touch it at first. Wary adults glance at the gallery security and keep their distance – their kids love it though and the parents have to drag them away. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Photographic work by Detroit-based Iranian-Iraqi artist Marrim Akashi Sani
The statue-toppling themes in Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian’s animation piece, bring to mind the political and social upheaval in the Levant, even as Bashar al-Assad’s statue is being toppled in Syria by rebel forces. Inspired by Sufist philosophy, these Iranian artists, now based in the United Arab Emirates, use evocatively layered film and drawing as a fluid and malleable force. They describe the style as ‘fluid painting’; each film is made up of 3,000 pieces of paper decorated with hand-painted figures and gestural motifs. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hand-painted animation by artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian
The Jameel Prize: Moving Images at the V&A until 16 March 2025
