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Anniversary programming spans a Palestinian photography fellowship, a Saudi royal garment exhibition and a new commission by Uzbek artist Aziza Kadyri
Adam Rouhana didn’t grow up with access to the V&A’s archives. As the current Jameel Fellow, he now spends his research time working through the museum’s substantial collection of Palestinian photography — the kind of sustained, behind-the-scenes access the fellowship was built to offer artists and researchers from the Middle East and its diaspora. His project is one small piece of what the Victoria and Albert Museum, Community Jameel and Art Jameel gathered in London to mark: 20 years since The Jameel Gallery opened and began reshaping how Islamic art is shown to the public.
Mohammed Jameel, founder of Community Jameel, attended the anniversary reception alongside HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal and HRH Prince Abdullah bin Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom. George Richards, director of Community Jameel, used the occasion to announce that the celebration had been designated the inaugural event in the official lead-up to the 2029 UK-Saudi Year of Culture.
What Two Decades Built
The gallery opened in July 2006 following a major refurbishment supported by the Jameel family, introducing bespoke display cases, lighting and multimedia resources to a collection that had outgrown its old presentation. Today it holds more than 400 objects, including the Ardabil Carpet, the Minbar of Sultan Qaytbay and a Fatimid rock crystal ewer.
Prince Turki Al-Faisal traced his own connection to the gallery back to its opening. “Twenty years ago, my friend Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel invited me to attend the inauguration of The Jameel Gallery,” he said. “Mr Jameel has formed his own endeavours, with many positive developments having occurred since.” The partnership between the Jameel family and the V&A has since expanded well past the gallery walls, into commissions, acquisitions, fellowships and digital initiatives. Its centerpiece is the Jameel Prize, established in 2009 as an international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic culture, which has exhibited work from 63 artists across seven editions and toured to 22 venues globally.
The Jameel Fellowship Programme gives artists, designers, architects, photographers and researchers opportunities to conduct sustained research with the V&A’s collections. Fellows have shared their work through displays, performances and symposia, including a film series in which they discuss a favorite object in the gallery.
A 20th Year Built Around Living Traditions
Rather than treat the anniversary as a moment to look backward, the V&A built a program aimed squarely at the present. Earlier this year, the museum hosted The Art of Egyptian Khayamiyya, bringing master tentmakers from Cairo’s historic Street of the Tentmakers to London for live demonstrations. In June, it opened Golden Threads: Dress from Saudi Arabia, a display of early 20th-century royal garments recently acquired by the museum. In July, it convened a conference bringing together curators and art historians from around the world to discuss how Islamic art is interpreted in museum settings today.
Fady Jameel, family ambassador of Community Jameel and chairman and founder of Art Jameel, said the through-line across all of it is continuity. “Over the past 20 years, the gallery has become a platform for research, public engagement, and contemporary creative practice, showing how historic artistic traditions continue to evolve,” he said. Sir Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, pointed to the numbers behind that claim: “Now in its 20th year, the Gallery continues to serve as one of the Museum’s most-admired spaces, showcasing 400 objects from our Islamic Middle East collection, free to access for all.”
Later this year, as part of the London Design Festival, artist Aziza Kadyri — who is of Uzbek descent and based in London — will unveil a site-specific commission built from rarely displayed embroidered works in the V&A’s collection, combining textile sculpture, hand-embroidered tapestries and interactive digital elements.
The reception itself drew Hassan Jameel, Hisham Hamza and Ghada Alsammanoudi, along with Emily Cherrington, chief executive of The King’s Foundation, a nearly 20-year partner of Community Jameel through the Jameel Houses of Traditional Arts, a network of craft schools in Cairo, Jeddah and on the King’s Foundation’s own Dumfries House estate in Scotland. Community Jameel’s focus on the Arab world combines sustaining historic design practices with practical job creation for craftspeople, a priority the organization has tied directly to the region’s youth employment challenges. Twenty years after a single gallery reopened with 400 restored objects, the project has become less about preserving a static collection and more about keeping the practices behind it alive — in fellows like Rouhana, in artists like Kadyri, and in the craftspeople the Jameel Houses train each year.