Bridging across the senses, the V&A’s Jameel Prize: Moving Images exhibition offers a visually stunning and immersive exploration of Islamic art, identity, history, and community. In centring largely around water and ecology, and their intrication in the weaves of social fabric in the Middle East and South Asia, the exhibition reflects the enduring spirits of resilience and renewal in the face of rupture and disruption.
“The film illustrates how communities remain marked by the instability of constant disruptions and the inevitability of change”
Spanning across film, photography, animation, sound, sculpture, and virtual reality, the exhibition features the works of seven finalists who each uniquely engage with the ways in which extractive industries and political dynamics shape the environmental landscape of their respective regions. By incorporating digital media and moving images, each piece comes alive, offering viewers a chance to see the world through a new lens. In this pursuit, the collection addresses themes of community and resilience in connection to one’s homeland, with each piece weaving together the personal and the political.
Rooted in the artists’ own heritage and cultural experience, the showcase paints an intimate portrait of climate and environmental disaster and its human toll. It amplifies the urgency to tell stories directly from those affected and highlight their voices. Walking through the exhibition, I struggled to decipher one clear winner, each of the seven artists had created a tender and deeply moving narrative.
The theme of water and ecology is first introduced in Alia Farid’s work, which opens the exhibition with a sculpture and a film. The film, Chibayish, delves into the communities in the wetlands of Iraq, exploring their navigation of the landscape following decades of environmental destruction and ecological violence from pollution and war. This footage captures the violence in the everyday lives of the young marsh residents who, through swimming, singing, and dancing, embody generations of rootedness in the landscape: the community’s survival is sustained by the river and the water buffalos they share the space with. As the camera glides across the river, children recite the names of families who live or once lived along the waterways.
This poignant act underscores the impact of environmental destruction, particularly the effects of radiation from depleted uranium bombs. Farid’s work beautifully sets the tone for the exhibition itself, depicting a raw image of how the aftermath of the violence of war is refashioned and repurposed in different forms by survivors, all within the framework of memory of the past but a hope for the future. Hearing the children’s recollection of earlier life and families they once knew, the production illustrates how communities remain marked by the instability of constant disruptions and the inevitability of change.
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji draws a raw and intimate story of identity and migration in his animated films. A Thread of Light Between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven transports audiences into the artist’s childhood experience growing up in Iraq, under the care of his mother, symbolised by just her nurturing hand that watches over them. The image of the sacred palm serves as the film’s centrepiece, while the rest of the screen transforms unpredictably, shifting from geometric patterns to images of eyes, faces, flowers, and nature. These ever-changing visuals weave a vivid tapestry of identity in a way that makes viewers feel nostalgic as though they are experiencing somebody else’s distant memories first-hand. At the end of the film, everything fades, a star travels down and then ascends with the hand, which comes to life for the first time. This represents the centrality and stability of family amidst the struggles of their early life.
“The film ends with three stark lines: ‘He was born, he toiled, he died’”
His other feature, Short Story in the Eyes of Hope, tells the biographical story of Alfraji’s father who was born in “the land of water” and grew up in the marshes of Iraq. The film chronicles his father’s struggles and hardships, from life under regime to his aspirations for a better life elsewhere. Moving from the marshes to the Baghdad, his “dream was jammed into a military suit” as soldiers were forced to live in mud huts and slums. The violent capacity of water resurfaces, this time capturing the plight of Iraq’s migratory marsh communities and the political struggles that they endured in seeking opportunities for a better future. Through intimate portraits of his father, from youth to old age, and words drawn onto the screen in English and Arabic, his life story unfolds against the backdrop of the sound from his own funeral prayer. The film ends with three stark lines: “He was born, he toiled, he died.” These words leave viewers to grapple with the harsh reality faced by many migrants whose lives are shaped by struggle and sacrifice under oppressive political forces.
Zahra Malkani intertwines the sonic and the sacred in her audio-visual archive of the Indus River people in Pakistan. Her work explores the Sindh community’s deep engagement with sound and waterways as integral to their spiritual and devotional practices. The community’s use of oral tradition and activism are a means of resistance against ecological violence and the threat of flooding wielded by corporate developments. Practices of prayer, chants, anthems, and music in Urdu and Sindhi unites the community in their expressions of grief and loss alongside their expressions of enduring love for the river that sustains them.
“The interplay between the sounds of the instruments and the rhythms of the water poetically revives the memory of their beloved landscape”
In both A Ubiquitous Wetness and All Water Is a Portal to All Water, Malkani fuses practices of devotion and dissent, lyrically portraying how spiritual traditions serve as both an anchor for resistance and a testament to the mutual dependency and solidarity between the fisherfolk community and their landscape. The interplay and dialogue between the sounds of the instruments and the rhythms of the water poetically revives the memory of their beloved landscape which comes to life and interacts with its inhabitants: “the listening brings the sound to life; the sound brings the listener to life.”
Khandakar Ohida, the winner of this year’s Jameel Prize, captivated audiences with her installation and film Dream Your Museum. Her work revolves around her uncle, Khandakar Selim, who curated an extensive collection of 50 years’ worth of memorabilia displayed in and around his traditional mud home in West Bengal. This film offers a tender portrait of a life marked by objects and the beauty of commemorating the everyday. Gathered together, the items largely reveal a story of upheaval, partition and colonialism, but without a strictly arranged set up, the audience is invited to construe their own narrative from the collection of ordinary objects and make their own meanings come alive. The simple and discarded items have a value in them, worth rescuing and remembering – a beautiful reminder that life is lived and defined by the small, seemingly mundane moments.
While traditional museums may depict colonial India and partition through grand maps, speeches, and statues, Dream Your Museum presents an alternative perspective. It is a reminder that storytelling should not be limited to a specific ideology, group, or sense of grandiosity, but is welcome to all, to construct and reconstruct in their perceptions of the ordinary. It emphasises the personal and intimate moments and possessions that mark the lived experience of historical events. The idea that items can come alive and tell stories of their own challenges wasteful consumption, encouraging viewers to see beauty and meaning in the ordinary. Selim’s museum, “jadu ghar” (“magic house”), is an invitation to dream and imagine. His collection from various sources raises questions of displacement, particularly when the girl questions, “don’t you have anything that truly belongs to you? Only yours?” The artist invites us to envision a future where cultural heritage is liberated from the constraints of convention and exclusivity.
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