Huda Tayob & Miriam Hillawi Abraham Awarded The Red Sea Curatorial Open Call

Art Jameel is excited to announce Huda Tayob and Miriam Hillawi Abraham as the winners of the second edition of the Red Sea Curatorial Open call at Hayy Jameel, with their proposal titled ‘Red Wind, Coral Worlds’.

From February-April 2025 curators from around the globe submitted exhibition proposals to be developed for Hayy Arts’ first floor gallery at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah. Art Jameel particularly sought after exhibition proposals that engaged with themes pertaining to the Red Sea – including but not limited to its connected geographies, histories, ecologies, or the movement of people and ideas.

Huda Tayob and Miriam Hillawi Abraham’s outstanding chosen proposal examines the multifaceted nature of talismans as spaces where the converging histories of movement and transfer from across the Red Sea region can be witnessed. Talismans—ta’wiz, ክታብ—are small, often hidden objects: worn beneath clothing, stitched into fabric, or placed at the thresholds of homes. Their scale may appear small and insignificant, yet their effect is immense. These objects are vessels of protection, deflection, and navigation. They carry with them a spiritual weight, alongside geographies of memory and movement, the presence of absence. This exhibition takes the talisman as a point of departure and a navigational device for tracing the red winds of zar across Red Sea littorals and their expansive coral ecologies and terrains. Moving across coastal shores, the exhibition asks: how might we understand talismans beyond personal artifacts, as architectures of migration? How do these objects speak to worlds crossed, entangled, and left behind, while deeply imbricated in constructing and imagining other futures? Red Wind, Coral Worlds draws together works to consider what it means to build worlds from what we carry with us.

The curators will work alongside the Art Jameel team who will provide guidance on the exhibition’s development, exhibition production and design, logistics, and installation.

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and theorist currently based at the Royal College of Art, UK, having previously taught at the University of Manchester, University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures focused on the African continent, with an interest in archival silences and absences. She was lead curator of the digital pan-African platform (2020 – 2021) Archive of Forgetfulness, a Mellon researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture on the Centring Africa project (2020 – 2022), a Graham Foundation grantee (2022; 2023), and a Vila-Sul fellow (2024). She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives along east African coasts Cape Town to Port Said.

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. Abraham’s research interests are concerned with the politics of space as well as technocultures rooted in the African continent. She has worked as the game-code instructor at Bay Area Video Coalition’s youth program for over three years, was a Mellon researcher for the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Digital Now multidisciplinary project, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academy. Abraham’s work has been featured in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as part of the Special Project “Guests from the Future”,  as well the “/imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual” exhibition at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema.”