On Wednesday, the winner of the prestigious Jameel Prize will be announced in Istanbul, and Dubai-based Lara Assouad is one of 11 shortlisted artists nominated for the fourth edition of the award – a biannual competition that recognises contemporary artists and designers inspired by Islamic traditions.
On the day, all of the competing artworks will be exhibited at the Pera Museum in Istanbul and remain on show until August, when they will start to tour international venues.
Assouad has been nominated for the £25,000 (Dh132,583) award for her modular Arabic letters – an abstract typography project created as a set of wooden blocks and stamps.
The project began in 2009 through the artist's work with Dar Onboz, a Lebanese publisher of children's books. She designed a typeface for two titles – Tabati and Aswat Al Abjadiyyah – which were exhibited in Munich at the Haus Der Kunst and at Agial Art Gallery in Beirut in 2010.
Three years later, Assouad won the Opera Prima award at the Bologna Children's Book Fair for the illustrations, type design and layout of Tabati, and was invited by Dubai's Tashkeel art hub to conduct workshops. Through these sessions and her own work, Assouad developed and refined her typeface into the modular Arabic type project that was nominated for the Jameel Prize.
The idea is simple but arresting – Arabic letters are stripped of their decorative and ornate traditions but retain their basic shapes of rectangles, circles, squares and triangles while maintaining their proportion – and this creates eye-catching geometric shapes.
Through the four- and five-day workshops that began at Tashkeel and spread to UAE universities, Assouad taught young designers how to play with Arabic letters using a variety of interesting media – anything that could be broken down into basic modules or a kit of parts.
So, while she has been nominated for this one project, it is her entire practice that is gaining wider recognition,
Tabati came about when her son was 3 years old and learning to read and write. Assouad remembers that at that time, he was her driving force – she wanted him to have a different experience of Arabic, to see it as cool and contemporary.
Whether she wins the award or not, to have such international exposure for this project is certainly a high moment in her career.
What is the Jameel Prize?
Awarded in partnership with Art Jameel – an initiative founded by the Jeddah-based Jameel family to foster and promote contemporary art and creative entrepreneurship across the Middle East – the Jameel Prize has many links to the UAE.
Art Jameel’s head office is in Dubai and in September, the former director of Art Dubai, Antonia Carver, will take over as its director.
The Jameel Prize was established in 2006 after the Jameel Foundation oversaw the renovation of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Gallery of Islamic Art in London, which now also uses the Jameel name. The winner of the first award was Iranian artist Afruz Amighi for her work 1001 Pages (2008).
Coincidentally, she has a stunning solo show running now at the Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai.
In 2011, Rachid Koraïchi, from Algeria, was awarded the prize for his work Les Maîtres Invisibles (The Invisible Masters) – a series of embroidered cloth banners. The third edition of the prize was awarded to Dice Kayek, a Turkish fashion label established in 1992 by Ece and Ayse Ege. The sisters are on the jury of Jameel Prize 4, alongside Alan Caiger-Smith, a British potter, Rose Issa, a prominent London-based curator, writer and publisher, Hammad Nasar, the head of research and programmes at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and Martin Roth, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In addition to the Jameel Prize, Art Jameel is the founding partner of Edge of Arabia, the Crossway Foundation and Jeddah Art Week.
• The Jameel Prize exhibition will run from June 8 to August 14 at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey
aseaman@thenational.ae