Jameel prize 2024 review – tradition, trinkets and a telephone of rocks
NEWS | 17 December 2024
Somewhere along the Euphrates river, in the marshlands of southern Iraq, a young boy calls out to water buffalo. He imitates their mournful bellows and grunts – calls that sound prehistoric. A young girl prepares khirret, a candy made from the pollen of bardi, a kind of reed ubiquitous in the Ahwar marshlands. She sifts the xanthous powder and turns it into mustard-coloured hunks. Her modest home, too, is made of reeds. The children who appear in Alia Farid’s Chibayish are sustained by the river and the buffalo – in one especially luscious scene, an adolescent boy rides bare-backed on the giant crescent-horned creatures, moving gracefully through the murky brown, intensely polluted water. This chapter of the two-part film is shot at a close range: you see little more than the river edged with its dense reeds and the inside of the small huts on its banks, giving a sense of how intertwined this tight-knit community is to each other, and to nature. The effect is also stifling and claustrophobic, evoking their shrinking habitable space – once part of the largest wetlands in Asia. In an interview, the children trace out a map of their community, naming the few families that still live along the waterways, and those that have been displaced – the impact of environmental destruction, ongoing since depleted uranium bombs were dropped on the region . View image in fullscreen Sumptuous … a still from Alia Farid’s Chibayish, 2022. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist Slow-paced, intimate and sumptuously shot, Chibayish sets the tone of the shortlist show for the seventh edition of the Jameel prize – a triennial award of £25,000 for art inspired by Islamic tradition. Installations by seven shortlisted artists are bound by theme rather than medium, but they call out to one another as you move through the galleries, close-up encounters with the impact of crisis and conflict, echoes of ravaged landscapes, closely guarded dreams and mystical waters, stories that often drift on ritual and song. These are works that listen, rather than speak – quite literally in the case of Zahra Malkani’s project, A Ubiquitous Wetness, an audio archive of devotional sounds the artist collected from communities living along the Indus river and the coast of the Indian Ocean. Malkani is from the province of Sindh, Pakistan, a community defined in part by their ongoing struggle with the infrastructure around the water since partition. More recently, Sindh was devastated by floods that affected 33 million people and left eight million displaced. Most of the water that flows into the Indus is from glaciers in the Himalayas and regional monsoon rains and has seen catastrophic fluctuations precipitated by climate change. Malkani recorded sounds, songs, prayers, representing the convergence of spirituality and political activism. A slice of this dense research is presented via texts, audio and a triple-screen installation, slow-moving, mystical images of the aqueous landscapes, with headphones to listen, seated at a low table with cushions on the floor. View image in fullscreen Alawi and His Bike, from the Muharram series, 2023, by Marrim Akashi Sani. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist Traditions, practices and histories are often passed through families, through objects or immaterial culture, in the home, the intimate, modest setting for most of the works. As well as the voices of children on the frontline of the climate crisis in Chibayish, several works represent oracular elders, bastions of community histories. Marrim Akashi Sani’s prismatic lightboxes – the only non-moving images, though they jump off the walls with their highly saturated, bright exposure – portray people’s lives through their tchotchkes. The artist’s own trinket box contains Iranian coins, a ring that belonged to her father and items from the refugee camp in Saudi Arabia that was home in the early 1990s when the family fled Iraq. There is also a stirring portrait of Akashi Sani’s grandmother, Bebe, her face framed by a black hijab, her skin bearing the faint marks of traditional dagga tattoos she received as a girl in Iraq. The photographs, all from her series Muharram, were taken in the American midwest as documents of the Muslim community. But they could be anywhere, the objects could be anything; culture is something carried with us, objects, rituals and bodies are the vessels. Moving image exhibitions are rarely crowdpleasers, a fact that is overlooked here. A lot of attention has been put into the sound, with custom speakers made to look like natural seagrass material, and on lighting, which is dim and ambient, but overall it is hung like a conventional painting show – and there’s hardly any seating. With almost two hours of film to watch and listen to, this seems a big ask and doesn’t help the audience access these complex, nuanced works. But all is forgiven in the room dedicated to the deserved winner of the 2024 prize, Khandakar Ohida, for her installation and film Dream Your Museum, a gentle, tender and poetic portrait of her uncle Khandakar Selim, who has collected bric-a-brac and curiosities for more than 50 years, amassing 12,000 objects, all lovingly cared for, stowed in metal trunks and displayed in his traditional mud home in West Bengal, where much of the film takes place. View image in fullscreen Uncle’s treasures … a still from Dream Your Museum by Khandakar Ohida. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist Items from Selim’s collection are installed around the room revealing another story about partition and colonialism. There are also stamps, old pens, telephones and clocks, perfume bottles – you have the sense that Selim saw something in them worth rescuing and remembering. The word for museum in Bengali translates as “magic house”. The film is an invitation to dream, to make your own meaning come alive, even the most banal. Selim’s home has been demolished since Dream Your Museum was made. The 18-minute film unfolds as a delightful, whimsical conversation between Khandakar and an inquisitive young relative – a girl asking questions about the collection, to which he responds with sincerity and warmth, passing on his knowledge and agreeing with the girl’s reinventions of the objects – sure, this telephone is made of rocks. What is the point of a museum, after all, if you can’t dream up your own stories and add your own narratives to the past? But don’t you have anything that belongs truly to you? the girl implores. Of course – “there are some fingernails, I’ll show you later”.
Author: Charlotte Jansen.
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