Marking the Dubai arrival of Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics, join us for a conversation with exhibiting artists and prize finalists Golnar Adili, Hadeyeh Badri and Bushra Waqas Khan. Together with exhibition curator Rachel Dedman, the artists will look back at their work, discussing their design process and their thematic preoccupations.

Focussed on contemporary design, the sixth edition of the Jameel Prize debuted at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and has toured to Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Chile and El Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in Argentina, before arriving “home” at Jameel Arts Centre.

Founded in 2009, the Jameel Prize is a partnership between the V&A and Art Jameel and is the world’s leading award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition.

Golnar Adili is an artist and designer based in New York. Growing up in Tehran after the 1979 Revolution, Adili’s early life was characterised by separation and uprootedness. Her practice explores aspects of her identity through Persian language and poetry. Her work on display in the Jameel Prize pays homage to her father, transforming one of his letters into an installation both monumental and delicate.

For Hadeyeh Badri textiles offer a rich creative language. Her weavings incorporate Arabic writing into the dense and delicate fabric. The text is personal, taken from the diary of Badri’s beloved late aunt, and Badri uses weaving as a way of reconnecting with her. Calling upon poetic tropes and their connection to memory, Badri considers her textiles intimate, imperfect monuments to loved ones.

Bushra Waqas Khan was originally trained as a printmaker, but today designs and constructs intricate dresses at miniature scale. Her inspiration and source material is affidavit paper, which is decorated with national emblems and Islamic patterns, and used for all official documents in Pakistan. Khan transfers the paper’s patterns onto fabric, which she cuts and embroiders into elaborate garments.

Rachel Dedman is a curator, writer and art historian specialised in modern and contemporary art and design from the Middle East. Since 2019 she has been the Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Recent projects for the V&A include Beirut Mapped, a writing commissioning platform for Lebanese artists; the foundation of a research residency programme; and Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics, an exhibition featuring the work of eight contemporary artists and designers from the global south.