Jameel Prize - The People's Choice

We are pleased to announce The People's Choice winner is Aisha Khalid.

Aisha Khalid's two entries are 'Kashmiri Shawl' and 'Name, Class, Subject' (2009). 'Kashmiri Shawl' is a cashmere cloth pierced with 300,000 gold-plated pins which create a traditional paisley pattern. For Khalid, the sharp pins symbolise the agony of the people in occupied Kashmir.

'Name, Class, Subject' is an artists book inspired by the exercise or ‘copy books’ used by government schools in Pakistan to teach writing in Urdu and English. Khalid’s inspiration for her work is based directly on her classical training as a miniature painter and draws on her experience as a child growing up in a society shaped by a bilingual culture. Khalid has painted each of the 280 pages of the book in the Mughal style of miniature painting, to look like a ruled exercise book.

There are ‘errors’ in the Urdu pages, reminders of the mistakes Khalid used to find in her printed text books in Pakistan, such as missing text and lines or badly cut margins. In the middle of the book both English and Urdu page lines are blurred and overlapping, referencing the tensions underlying Pakistan’s past and present.

The lined pages invite readers to imagine their suggested narrative and encourages them to write their own text between the lines.

 

 

The Jameel Prize works are currently on display in the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, Room 18a.