My New Creatives Traineeship
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Posted on February 2025
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The Welland Festival and Ogden Water Residency
Posted on 3rd February 2025
The Welland Festival (based in Elland) is a celebration of wellbeing and the arts. Taking place on October 30th 2024, I supported Everybody Arts with their stall alongside one of the artists in residence, Sally Barker. Everybody Arts were showcasing the ‘Boxes of Wellbeing’. The 8 different boxes contain creative wellbeing activities that can be taken out by people and community groups in Calderdale and include specialist materials and resources.
The festival was an opportunity for me to connect and hear more about the wonderful local projects, community groups and artists involved in the arts and wellbeing sector.
Supporting Sally Barker’s Ogden Water Reserve Residency (Culturedale’s artist residency), I volunteered to help with a workshop hosting local community groups like the St Augustine’s Centre. Sally had spent her residency at Ogden Water investigating our relationship with nature, the natural environment and creating beautiful pieces in response.
Delving into Genocide
Posted on 28th January 2025
What is Genocide?
The United Nations (UN) defines genocide using the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide’s Article II. It includes two main parts:
- A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
- A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The UN goes on to share the several layers involved in determining a genocide. For example, “a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” and “victims of genocide are deliberately targeted (one of the four groups protected under the convention = national, ethnical, racial or religious) as a group and not as individuals.
The underpinnings of what constitutes a genocide (and what does not) can appear ambiguous and questionable from the juxstoposing UN Member States viewpoints and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This poses many questions around what happens if a genocide is met by the definitions as agreed by UN Member States and how does the ICJ uphold responsible parties for genocide, alongside those who aid those committing genocide?
Artist AduAmani's Micro-residency
Posted on 17th January 2025
This programme empowers emerging artists to gain work experience and potentially link in with other creatives in similar or different fields. My areas of interest are curating, gallery management, installing exhibitions and working within a social justice lens alongside community groups to support their health and wellbeing (art therapy).
Artist AduAmani was completing her micro-residency at the gallery in Everybody Arts. I had a wonderful opportunity to support AduAmani by installing some of her pieces for her new project, Ananse Ntentan. The kayayo women modelled the beautiful pieces that had been repurposed from rich, colourful, and sustainable African patterns. She explores stories of migration and Ghanian folklore through weaving stories of resilience.
Introduction to New Creatives
Posted on 10th January 2025
Salaam and welcome to my first blog post series of My New Creatives Traineeship. I will be documenting my work, processes and reflections from the New Creatives Traineeship at Everybody Arts, Halifax.
My first week began in October 2024 where I set out my intentions for my project and allowed myself the chance to slowly ease into the space, familiarise myself with the team and realise my initial ideas. To begin with I was quite nervous in starting this project and allowing myself the freedom to take on this exciting role. Previously, I have not given myself the time and space to hone in on my arts practice and skill set, and this worked out as a tempting way to challenge myself creatively and mentally.
The two central ideas spoke to me on both a personal and professional level. The first idea was to explore British Muslim identities and work alongside the Muslim community based in Calderdale, linking in with Ramadan 2025. However, as the current genocide in Palestine and silent genocides across Sudan, Congo, Myanmar and Xinjiang take place, this amount of injustice and global suffering felt more urgent.
How can I do justice to the theme of genocide? We have seen the biggest, most documented genocide unfolding on our very screens in Palestine. I intend to use this opportunity to highlight the injustices committed upon the Palestinian people and consider the least documented or less spoken of, silent genocides unfolding in Sudan and other countries. To tie the countries together, I aim to explore subtexts such as the patterns of genocide, the psychological disposition of genocide on patriotism, colonialism and the profits of wars.
When thinking about the mediums I want to work with, I consider textiles and drawing to be a big aspect of this. Textiles affirms my Bangladeshi roots and growing up in the world’s first industrial city, Manchester. This enables me to explore some practices from my personal identity whilst considering aspects of storytelling and weaving this into my practice.
A really important aspect of this traineeship is the mentoring I receive. In my first session, I shared some of my initial thoughts, exploring ideas on testing and the pressure felt on creating a final outcome. Previous New Creatives artists have created powerful, thought-provoking exhibitions and you can find out more about their work on the web link above. To know there was no expectation for me to exhibit, lifted some pressure off of me. Alternative ideas to an exhibition include displaying the artworks I create, having a discussion about them, a question and answer panel, trialling my ideas as workshops, posing several questions to test out the topics, and getting initial feedback responses.