Indian artist Khandakar Ohida’s 2022 film, Dream Your Museum, about her uncle’s unconventional collection of objects, wins the prestigious Jameel Prize 2024.
Artist and filmmaker Khandakar Ohida is the winner of the 2024 Jameel Prize, a triennial competition for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition. At a special ceremony on November 27, 2024 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Ohida was announced as the recipient of the £25,000 award. The Jameel Prize, founded in 2009 in partnership with the V&A, is one of the philanthropic endeavours of Art Jameel, the Jameel family’s cultural initiative, headquartered in Saudi and the UAE.
The theme for this year’s prize was moving image and digital media work, selected via an open call. An exhibition of works by the winner and seven shortlisted artists – chosen from more than 300 submissions – is on display at the V&A South Kensington until March 16, 2025. “Getting shortlisted for the Jameel Prize was already a big achievement and winning was a bit of a shock,” Ohida reflects, a little more than a week after the show was unveiled to the public.
Yet at the Jameel Prize exhibition curated by the V&A’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Rachel Dedman (it will later tour to Cartwright Hall, Bradford, UKand Hayy Jameel, Jeddah), it is easy to see why the jury selected Ohida’s work Dream Your Museum (2022) for the prestigious prize; it is a multilayered work, inscribed with personal and collective memory, a contestation of the conventional museum model and celebration of the power of objects at once.
The focus of Ohida’s installation is a film about her uncle Selim and the vast collection of more than 12,000 objects he amassed over 50 years, cared for and displayed in his traditional mud home in Kelepara, a rural village in Hooghly, West Bengal. The contemplative film is part documentary, part magical realism – moving from beautiful, slow panning frames of the countryside and Selim at home, carefully tending to his collection and whimsical conversations between Selim and Maria – Ohida’s young niece, who offers interpretations and ideas about the objects Selim shows her, unpacking them from metal trunks that serve as storage for most of his collection.
Dream Your Museum, installation view, Ohida Khandakar, on view at Jameel Prize: Moving Images, V&A South Kensington, 2024 Image: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
For the installation at the V&A, the walls are painted a rich, earthy taupe-hue, evoking the mud home they were once displayed in (which has since been destroyed by a cyclone) – with some of the objects from Selim’s ‘museum’ – personal papers, pages from books, clocks, telephones, stamps, perfume bottles, pens and other desultory household items rescued from the rubbish and now imbued with new meanings. Selim began collecting in 1973 and many of the objects were found when he worked as an assistant to a doctor, travelling to patient’s homes and picking up unwanted things. Other objects were discovered at flea markets.
Detail view of Ohida Khandakar's uncle, Khandakar Selim’s collection of objects amassed over the past 50 years, as part of Dream Your Museum, Ohida Khandakar, on view at Jameel Prize: Moving Images, V&A South Kensington, 2024 Image: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
