This Video is part of the art project "Circle of Looks" by Adwoa Adjei, Carol Pilars de Pilar, Thyra Schmidt and Anne Schülke:
"Circle of Looks" invited a random group of women to take part in activities: cooking, talking, posing for portraits and creating clay bowls. Some of the women have the legal status of refugees. Other don't.
During one performance, the women spoke and sang into ceramic bowls. A video recording of the performance resulted into a Two-Channel Video:
vimeo.com/343465319
In collaboration with the women autobiographical stories and portraits were created and presented in the artist book "Circle of Looks. A dream". The women's stories appear in English and German and Somali, Russian, Bengali, French, Twi, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic and Romanian. The book was designed by Thyra Schmidt.
In autumn 2018, Katja Grawinkel-Claassen, together with Madhusree Dutta, Miriam Koch and Mithu Sanyal, hosted a discussion at the Forum Freies Theater. Dutta is director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, Koch is the director of the Office for Migration and Integration in Düsseldorf and Sanyal is an author and journalist. The women talked about solidarity, migration policy, empowerment, art and the ambivalence of visibility.
In April 2019, the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf presented an exhibition documenting the process, featuring drawings, the artist book, the video installation and this video.
For further information:
anneschuelke.de
kunststiftung-nrw.de/de/aktivitaeten/gefoerderte_projekte/literatur/foerderprojekte_2019_auswahl/circle_of_looks/
