Twenty Years On, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel’s V&A Partnership Still Grows
The Jameel Gallery turned 20 this year, and the anniversary reception at the Victoria and Albert Museum was less a retrospective than a status update. Alumni of the Jameel Houses in Cairo and Jeddah worked ceramics and wood inlay live for guests, a reminder that the partnership started in 2006 was never meant to end with a plaque.
Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel attended the reception marking the gallery’s 20th anniversary alongside Prince Turki Al-Faisal and Prince Abdullah bin Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Sir Tristram Hunt, the V&A’s director, said the museum remains grateful for the family’s early backing, without which the gallery’s 2006 opening would not have happened.
The gallery opened after a major refurbishment of the V&A’s Islamic Middle East collection, now home to more than 400 objects. Since then, the partnership has expanded into the Jameel Prize, an award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic culture that has shown work from 63 artists across seven editions, and the Jameel Fellowship Programme, which currently supports Adam Rouhana’s research into the museum’s Palestinian photography archive.
From One Room to a Full Program
Family ambassador Fady Jameel called the gallery a platform for research and public engagement that has outlasted its original brief. The reception itself was named the opening event in the lead-up to the 2029 UK-Saudi Year of Culture, tying a two-decade museum partnership to a much larger diplomatic calendar.
Hassan Jameel, Hisham Hamza and Ghada Alsammanoudi also attended, alongside Emily Cherrington of The King’s Foundation. Twenty years after a single gallery reopened with roughly 400 restored objects, the project now spans fellowships, acquisitions and a touring prize, evidence that a museum partnership can keep expanding well past its opening night.