Brent Journey to Justice

This collective art exhibition was based around the US civil rights movement and key struggles for freedom in the UK, with interactive displays from Journey to Justice, a volunteer-led human rights education charity. Using testimony, film and interviews, music and poetry, the exhibition examined what leads people to become and stay active in working for social justice, highlighting what makes non-violent human rights movements successful.

The exhibition in Brent included an illuminated scroll created to make Nelson Mandela a freeman of Brent; anti-apartheid memorabilia on loan from Action for Southern Africa; poetry by Virna Teixeira written in collaboration with local Brazilians; “Dress for Our Time” by Professor Helen Storey, a dress created out of a decommissioned refugee tent that once housed a family of displaced people at Za’atari Camp in Jordan; and a reimagining of my project Human Bridges.

Human Bridges focuses on the power of art over conflict, and this time, it was presented in the form of an art installation. Prints of the 10 artworks and texts, hung in handmade frames (assembled from wood pieces, hand painted in black acrylic and reinforced by wires). All these elements, suspended in the centre of the exhibition space, symbolised the bridges built between ten Syrian artists who connected at the Fine Arts University of Damascus and the thin line of friendship that relates them. My project evolved in Brent Museum to include new art pieces created by the wonderful humans of Brent communities, through inclusive art workshops that I offered, using different mediums from sketching, collages, to printing.

Human Bridges narrators are artists: Soulaf Abas, Rana Nezam, Sawsan Nourallah, Eman Lolah, Abdulla Jassem, Abdulrazzak Alsalhani, Jean Hanna, Firas Saleh, Salam Alhassan, and Dima Karout. 

Human Bridges art installation was presented at Brent Museum and Archives as part of Brent’s Journey to Justice exhibition from June to September 2019. More info: journeytojustice.org.uk/brent/