Opening May 20, 2026, ‘Red Wind, Coral Worlds’ is an upcoming exhibition curated by winners of the Art Jameel Curatorial Open Call, Huda Tayob and Miriam Hillawi Abraham.

Red Winds, Coral Worlds sites the Red Sea within an expanded and interconnected oceanic terrain. The exhibition traces the entangled worlds that converge across its waters, attending to the material and affective remnants left in the wake of centuries of movement and migration shaped by trade, pilgrimage, and displacement. 

The works in the exhibition act as navigational systems –  maps that negotiate arrival and loss, and offerings that recall forgotten pasts.  Drawing on familial and communal archives, they speak to ongoing waves of disruption and continuity. Coastal currents carry worlds: from the coral and mangrove shores binding Jeddah to Suakin, as part of a wider constellation of east African and Indian Ocean coral cities; to the north trade winds traversing the Sahara; and the red winds from Ethiopia which sweep across the Arabian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, carrying sediment and songs. In the exhibition, trade, pilgrimage, enslavement and scholarly exchange converge in the scent of cloves, shifting practices of Zar, the stain of henna, utterances in poetry, and in the oceanic and coastal terrains that hold and transmit memory. These works understand the Red Sea as part of an expansive network of exchange and relation, bound through ecological and social currents. 

Working across materiality and scale, the exhibition holds space through scent, texture, residue, and sound. Artworks are placed in conversation with historical and found objects, inviting a shift in attention, a simultaneous attunement to the contemporary and the ancestral, the everyday, the ceremonial and oceanic. Moving across coastal shores and coral worlds, the works in the exhibition ask how, through an attention to what is carried by wind and seas, we might engage with the absent present.

Artists include: Abeer Sultan, Ameena Aljerman Al Ali, Basmah Felemban, Dima Srouji, Gouled Ahmed and Asmaa Jama, Hashim Nasr, Henok Melkamzer, Hoda Afshar, Hussein Shariffe, Joseph Kamaru, Madiha Sikander, Mustafa Saeed, Myriam Omar Awadi, Rund Alarabi, Sara Abdu, Sarah Al Abdali, and Shiraz Bayjoo.

About the Art Jameel Curatorial Open Call:
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 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.”