Adam Rouhana spends his working hours in a part of the Victoria and Albert Museum most visitors never see: storage rooms and study spaces where the museum keeps its collection of Palestinian photography, boxes of prints and negatives too fragile or too specific to hang on a gallery wall. As the current Jameel Fellow, that access is his job.
Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel helped set that access in motion nearly two decades ago, when a refurbishment he backed alongside his family reopened the V&A’s Islamic Middle East collection in July 2006 as The Jameel Gallery. What began as a display of roughly 400 historic objects, among them the Ardabil Carpet and a Fatimid rock crystal ewer, eventually grew a research arm built for people like Rouhana, whose work sits closer to the present than the past.
How the Fellowship Actually Works
The Jameel Fellowship Programme brings in artists, designers, architects, photographers and researchers, most with ties to the Middle East or its diaspora, and gives them sustained time inside the V&A’s archives rather than a single guided visit. Fellows have shared what they find through public displays, live performances and academic symposia, along with a recurring film series in which each fellow discusses one object from the collection that shaped their thinking.
That film series format keeps the program grounded in something more immediate than academic publication. Rather than produce a paper destined for a specialized readership, a fellow sits with a single object from the collection and explains, on camera, why it matters to them personally. The approach turns the archive into a set of individual stories rather than one institutional narrative, told one object and one fellow at a time.
That structure was very much on display at this year’s 20th anniversary reception for The Jameel Gallery, where Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel attended alongside Prince Turki Al-Faisal and members of his own family, including Fady Jameel, Hassan Jameel, Hisham Hamza and Ghada Alsammanoudi. Rouhana’s ongoing project was cited as one example of the fellowship still doing its intended job two decades after the gallery that funds it first opened.
A Program With Its Own Alumni Network Now
Two decades is long enough for a fellowship to accumulate a history of its own. Past fellows have moved on to exhibitions, teaching posts and further research grants, carrying V&A-backed work into other institutions. The anniversary program leaned into that continuity rather than treating it as incidental: alongside Rouhana’s photography research, the museum used the milestone year to open Golden Threads, a display of early 20th-century Saudi royal garments, and to prepare a new commission from artist Aziza Kadyri built from rarely displayed embroidered textiles in the V&A’s archive.
Fady Jameel, chairman and founder of Art Jameel, has pointed to that pattern as the clearest sign the gallery is doing what it was built to do: turning historic objects into active research rather than sealing them behind glass indefinitely. The Jameel Prize, established in 2009 as an award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic culture, extends the same logic outward, having shown work from 63 artists across seven editions and toured to 22 venues worldwide.
Where the Research Goes Next
Rouhana’s fellowship is still underway, with no set date for when his research into the V&A’s Palestinian photography holdings will surface in a public display. What is clear from the anniversary program is that whatever he produces will join a growing body of fellowship work that has outlasted the original refurbishment by a wide margin, proof that a single funding decision in 2006 kept generating new research long after the ribbon was cut.
