Jameel Prize announcement
Bird Palace, Sevan Bicakci, 2005 (photo: Reza Hemmetirad and Levent Yucel, Private Collection)
The winner of the Jameel Prize, a brand new £25,000 award for artists and designers inspired by Islamic culture, has been announced by the V&A
And the winner is Afruz Amighi. She’s an Iranian-born artist who’s currently based in New York, where she finished a fine arts degree in 2007. Although she works and exhibits in the US, Amighi’s pieces are very much about her native Iran. She draws on motifs from architecture, Persian carpets and textiles as well as referencing Islamic myths and religion in her work.
Her Jameel-prize winning work is 1001 Pages. It’s a shadow piece made out of a giant suspended stencil of thin plastic sheet through which Amighi directs a light projector so that a ghostly shadow is seen on the wall behind. The pattern’s highly elaborate, and has a lace-like delicacy. It’s clever, beautiful but subtle, and perfectly fulfils the prize’s aim of showing how contemporary artists interact and are inspired by traditional Islamic craft and design.
The other shortlisted artists are Reza Abedini, Hassan Hajjaj, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Seher Shah, Camille Zakharia, Hamra Abbas, Sevan Bicakci and Susan Hefuna. Their work is on show at the V&A until 13 September.
www.vam.ac.uk
