The Jameel Prize for Islamic Art at the UK's Victoria & Albert Museum

THE ARTS DESK
By Marina Vaizey

Fashion Week (2010) by Soody Shafiri

UNITED KINGDOM - Soody Shafiri’s Fashion Week (2010) (pictured above) digitally manipulates a large-scale photograph of a centuries-old Mughal miniature featuring a cheerfully ceremonial crowd of men and women in a palace courtyard, digitally inserting contemporary women in conventional, conservative Muslim dress on a catwalk in a palace courtyard, surrounded by the painted crowd of Mughal men and women(above). [It is] among the pieces in various media on exhibit from the 10 short-listed artists and designers for the 2011 Jameel Prize, which will be announced on 12 September (£25,000 for an artist or designer whose work is inspired by an Islamic aesthetic). Their personal faith (or lack of it) and family is irrelevant; what is crucial is their ability creatively to reinterpret for today any aspect of the arts of Islam, and in any material. The shortlist is chosen from hundreds of artists nominated worldwide by a broad group of experts who each may suggest up to five names. There is a changing panel of judges. [link]

Hadie Shafdie's '26000 Pages' echoes the physical act of ecstatic recitation