Bangladeshi Tabassum awarded for Islamic architecture

Marina Tabassum, a Bangladeshi architect, has won Jameel Prize, a biannual award that celebrates art and design inspired by the Islamic tradition.

A joint winner with Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar, Tabassum received the £25,000 prize in London last week, according to The National.

Marina Tabassum has designed the Bait ur Rouf mosque, completed in 2012 on the outskirts of Dhaka, for which she also won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016.

Her design of this mosque challenges notions of what a mosque should look like, said The National.

Jameel Prize is a biannual award launched in 2009.

The two winners, Tabassum and Moutashar, received the prize from Fady Jameel, president of Art Jameel, an organisation that promotes contemporary art across the Middle East, at London’s Victoria and Albert museum last week.

Director of the V&A and chair of the judging panel Tristram Hunt said, “The joint Jameel Prize 5 winners are both in dialogue with contemporary global discourses on art, and have produced exemplary work in two very different disciplines. They show an awareness of modernist practices of the 20th century, which have in turn drawn on traditions from around the world. At the same time, though, they are passionately rooted in and deeply learned about their own cultural legacies.”