Hayy Jameel: Jeddah’s new arts hub announces months-long opening season

Art Jameel, the independent organisation that supports artists and creative communities, welcomes visitors to Jeddah’s new creative complex, Hayy Jameel, from December 6, 2021 with an opening season that extends to April 30, 2022.

The launch of Hayy Jameel marks 75 years of Jameel family global philanthropy. The opening season celebrates Hayy Jameel’s multidisciplinary approach and its role as Jeddah’s home for the arts: December 2021 sees the inauguration of Hayy Arts and a roster of new exhibitions, commissions, projects and installations revealed across the creative complex, accompanied by Hayy Learning and Hayy Studios programmes; January – February 2022 has a focus on Jeddah’s cultural entrepreneurship with the first Hayy Residents moving into their spaces; and in March – April 2022, Hayy Cinema is set to open with Hayy Community, celebrated through a series of programmes, workshops, screenings and a special Ramadan calendar.

Welcoming the public from December 6, 2021, Hayy Jameel’s highly collaborative and innovative inaugural programme focusses on visual arts, steeped in long-term research and marked by participatory, material interventions ranging from sculptures in chocolate through to immersive light works and audiovisual structures. The programme is rooted in the context of Jeddah yet speaks to urgent themes of global relevance, involving more than 45 artists and researchers from around 20 countries and featuring existing and newly-commissioned works by 19 artists from Saudi Arabia.

Hayy Jameel, a 17,000-square-metre cultural complex, is designed by waiwai, an award-winning multidisciplinary architecture, landscape, interior, graphic and urban design studio, with offices in Dubai and Tokyo. Hayy Jameel’s building design has received multiple architectural accolades, including Gold in the Hong Kong Design Awards; Silver in the New York Design Awards; the Honour Award for Exceptional Design by the American Institute of Architects (Middle East chapter); and nominations for the 2A Continental Architectural Award and the London Design Awards. Principle architects Wael Al Awar and Kenichi Teramoto were recently awarded the Golden Lion for their curation of the UAE Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale; Hayy Jameel is their first major public building.

Fady Jameel, Chairman and Founder of Art Jameel, commented: “The opening of Hayy Jameel on December 6 is a milestone that marks 75 years of Jameel family global philanthropy. Jeddah now has a new destination; a cultural complex designed as a home for a wide range of creative disciplines.

Art Jameel has been working towards the opening of Hayy Jameel for more than 20 years. We have envisioned this complex and this opening moment with key cultural collaborators, and always with the community at the heart of our plans. The effort and passion of those who make up the Hayy Jameel community embody our commitment to playing our part in driving positive and impactful change for the city of Jeddah and the arts community across this region and beyond.”

Antonia Carver, Director of Art Jameel, also added: “Hayy Jameel’s opening season embodies the way we seek to work at Art Jameel — building programmes that are rooted in a local context with global resonance, that are developed through long-term research and exchange with artists and creative practitioners. Now we finally get to open up this exchange and our Hayy, our neighbourhood, to the public, welcoming visitors to this stunning campus, designed specifically for its context and the needs of the local creative community.”

Sara Al-Omran, Deputy Director of Art Jameel, said: “Hayy Jameel is designed to bring together a broad range of creative disciplines in one destination. The first Hayy Residents to join us during the opening season are all partners with Art Jameel in this journey, and they embody the best of the Saudi creative spirit — all are pioneering enterprises with renewed and compelling new concepts – from contemporary art and design to performance and culinary arts, through to publishing and design houses.”

Hayy Jameel’s Opening Season Programming

Hayy Arts

‘Staple: What’s on your plate?’
December 6, 2021 – April 30, 2022

The Hayy Arts “neighbourhood museum” opens with an exhibition co-curated by Art Jameel’s Rahul Gudipudi and Delfina Foundation’s Dani Burrows. ‘Staple: What’s on your plate?’ features 21 artworks, including seven new research-based commissions, developed in a “food lab” that has run for the past year. The exhibition draws upon the two institutions’ long-standing interest in food futures and the eco-social entanglements of what we eat.

Through a plethora of media that spans chocolate sculptures, beehives, print and audiovisual installations sampled from Jeddah, the exhibition looks at themes of trade, exchange, coloniality, labour, tradition, myth and neo-imperial food production. Engaging with artists and researchers from the wider region, South Asia and Africa through to Europe and beyond, ‘Staple: What’s on your plate?’ is the first exhibition of its kind in the Gulf.

Participating artists include Leen Ajlan, Moza Almatrooshi, Bricklab x Misht Studio, CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise), Annalee Davis, Mohammad Al Faraj, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Mariam Al Noaimi, Pratchaya Phinthong, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Fatima Uzdenova, Munem Wasif and Lantian Xie with films by Jonathas de Andrade, Florence Lazar, Franziska Pierwoss, Suha Shoman and Zina Saro Wiwa.

An accompanying robust and interactive public and learning programme includes artists, performers and researchers in addition to a rolling film programme of documentaries; talks; cooking and planting workshops; food tours and pop-ups with local producers. Participating artists include Mirna Bamieh, Bricklab, Mariam Al Noaimi, Cooking Sections, Salma Serry, Slavs and Tatars, Lantian Xie and Raed Yassin together with Ute Wassermann.

‘Illuminate: A Noor Riyadh Capsule’
December 6, 2021 – February 6, 2022

Situated across Hayy Jameel’s first floor is a series of large-scale, immersive light installations on tour and adapted from the inaugural 2021 Noor Riyadh festival organised by Riyadh Art. ‘Illuminate: A Noor Riyadh Capsule’ brings together works by 11 major Saudi artists who have contributed significantly to furthering the technical and social practice of art-making in the Kingdom and the wider region. Participating artists include Ahmed Angawi, Dana Awartani, Ayman Daydban, Manal Al Dowayan, Sultan bin Fahad, Ahmed Mater, Maha Malluh, Marwah Al Mugait, Nasser Al Salem, Rashed Al Shashai and Saeed Gamhawi.

‘Paused Mirror: The Saudi Artists’
December 2021 – December 2022

Hayy Jameel’s first year is marked by a new commission by artist Osama Esid that takes as a starting point his background in portraiture and explorations of historical photography methods. Displayed throughout Hayy Jameel’s three storeys, ‘Paused Mirror’ is a series of artists’ portraits taken using “wet plate collodion” methodology and developed via a collaborative journey through the Kingdom, with Esid setting up field studios in and around Riyadh, the Eastern Province and Jeddah, working with host artists and organisations. The project is intended as a multigenerational tribute to artists, who are at the heart of Hayy Community. The textural, hands-on nature of the photographic method also reflects Hayy Jameel’s commitment to the artistic process, and the trust placed in and between artists and the institution.

The Hayy Jameel Façade Commission
December 6, 2021 – August 1, 2022

The Hayy Jameel Façade Commission is a new annual programme that gives an artist the opportunity to develop a major public work for the 25-metre “canvas” on the front of the building — a feature integral to the architectural intent. The 2021-22 commission was selected by a nomination and rigorous jury process, and has been awarded to Riyadh-based painter and sculptor Nasser Almulhim. For the first edition of Hayy Jameel’s Façade Commission, Almulhim has adorned the pedestrian-facing façade with an intricate, sculptural design titled Contours on Collective Consciousness. The piece is inspired by the regional folk tale The dove, the partridge and the crow, which recounts the story of birds in a time of famine and hunger. The proposal was developed in partnership with artist and architect Tamara Kalo. The Façade Commission is kindly supported by Lexus.

‘Hayy Jameel: A creative community in the making’ by waiwai
December 6, 2021 – April 30, 2021

Set in Fenaa Hayy, a multidisciplinary space for the community, this display charts the making of Jeddah’s new creative complex by waiwai, bringing together a display of early architectural sketches, drawings and models of Hayy Jameel. The exhibition unfolds through space in four chapters, following four keywords that anchor the design principles of the complex conceptually and aesthetically: Agora, meaning a gathering place and assembly in ancient Greek cities; Light, a fundamental formal component within waiwai’s conceptual toolkit; Courtyards, the heart of Hayy and around which all activity is centred; Canvas, Hayy’s facades conceptualised as a ‘blank canvas’ on which to commission public artworks by emerging and established artists and designers.

‘Tactile Surfaces’ by Bricklab
December 6, 2021 – March 30, 2022

Following a global architectural competition launched by Art Jameel in 2019, an esteemed international jury selected the Jeddah-based architecture studio Bricklab‘s design for Hayy Cinema.

Ahead of Hayy Cinema’s upcoming launch in April 2022, Bricklab’s three-part installation brings together objects, models, videos and archival material that visually map out the architectural studio’s experimental approach to designing the city’s first arthouse cinema. The interactive and tactile installation is based on the body of work produced during the three-year design and research process, focussing on the community-building role of cinemas.