ShopJury for the 2023-2024 Hayy Jameel Façade Commission
We are thrilled to announce the jury for the 2023-2024 Hayy Jameel Façade Commission!
The esteemed jury includes the Saudi artist Manal Aldowyan, Deputy Director (Arts) at @artjameel Nora Razian, Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator (International Art) at Tate Modern, and long-time Chair of Modern and Contemporary Arts at The Met Museum, Sheena Wagstaff.
The Commission is a major opportunity for Saudi and Saudi-based artists to propose and create a monumental public artwork, which is then exhibited on the 25-metre “canvas” that is the front façade of Hayy Jameel, revealed in January 2024.
Manal AlDowayan
Born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1973, Manal AlDowayan is an artist that has been
long invested in interrogating ideas of visibility and invisibility as a critical witness
to the cultural metamorphosis engulfing her country and region. Manal has been
recognized for her work in sound, neon, and sculpture, and she is well known for
the participatory installations Suspended Together (2011) and Esmi-My Name
(2012), the result of workshops offering channels for thousands of women to
address unjust social customs. Manal’s practice also includes land art projects like
Now You See Me Now you Don’t (2020), permanently installed at the UNESCO
heritage site of AlUla.
Nabila Abdel Nabi
Nabila Abdel Nabi is currently Curator at International Art at Tate Modern where she has worked on exhibitions including Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, The Making of Rodin, as well as various displays of Huguette Caland, Akram Zaatari, Yto Barrada, Wael Shawky and Infinite Geometry. She is part of the core team of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. She was previously Associate Curator at The Power Plant, Toronto where she worked on solo exhibitions and facilitated new commissions by artists including Hajra Waheed, Abbas Akhavan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kader Attia, Latifa Echakhch, Vivian Suter, Karla Black, Omar Ba and Amalia Pica, among others. Prior to this she worked as Gallery Manager (Exhibitions), The Third Line, Dubai. She holds degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Chicago.
Nora Razian
Nora manages the exhibitions programme at the Jameel Arts Centre, and contributes to curatorial thinking across the board. Previous roles include heading up programmes at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, and curating public programmes at Tate, London. She has an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths College, London, where she also designed and taught the MA course ‘Critical Pedagogy in Contested Space’ at the Centre for Arts and Learning.
Sheena Wagstaff
As Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art from 2012-22, Wagstaff instigated a new, distinctive international strategy at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, amplifying its approach to modern art beyond the Western hemisphere to take account of the most consequential artists (often lesser known) of the 20th and 21st centuries, with especial relevance to the context and multiple histories of the Met’s global collections spanning 4,000 years.
A key aspect of her tenure was her leadership of The Met Breuer (2015-20), for which she oversaw the renovation of the iconic modernist building, and devised a highly acclaimed program of 32 exhibitions. With more than 1,400 acquisitions made over a decade, Wagstaff’s vision for a new collecting strategy was fortified by her assembly of a large, diverse, curatorial team representing extensive expertise from across the globe, especially in the regions of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
The Hayy Jameel Facade Commission is kindly supported by Abdul Latif Jameel Motors