This week, the winners of the 2011 Jameel Prize were announced. The Prize is for contemporary art or design inspired by traditions of Islamic craft and design, and this year’s official winner is Rachid Koraïchi, for his embroidered cloth banners. The People’s Choice winner is Aisha Khalid, who showed the wonderful ‘Kashmiri Shawl’ (a cashmere cloth pierced with 300,000 gold-plated pins in a traditional paisley pattern) and an artist’s book inspired by the exercise or ‘copy books’ used by government schools in Pakistan to teach writing in Urdu and English.
Click here for a 3 minute video that summarises the prize, and shows some of the entries being shown – and installed – at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Unsurprisingly, I was most interested in the Iran-related entries.
As illustrated here, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian is showing work demonstrating her distinctive work drawing on Iranian traditions of mirror mosaic (click here and here to see some Qajar examples in situ in Iran).
Babak Golkar uses the pattern of Persian carpets as a blue print for architectural scale models; and Bita Ghezelayagh works in the traditional Iranian craft of felt-making, being especially inspired by the Islamic tradition of talismanic garments (click here to see a talismanic shirt in the Topkapi Museum). Hadieh Shafie has produced paper scrolls, each marked with printed and hand written Persian text, then tightly rolled into concentric circles, to conceal or reveal different elements of the text.
Last, but certainly not least, Soody Sharifi‘s entry featured two digital collages using enlarged scans of original Persian miniatures in which inserts her own photographic images, creating what she calls ‘Maxiatures’ (rather than ‘miniatures’).
If you want to see the original pieces, the exhibition at the V&A is open until 25 September 2011.