Katharina Holstein-Sturm, a visible artist from Germany and Hyderabad-based activist-poet Jameela Nishat are from two totally different cultural backgrounds. What binds the duo is a dream to raised the place of girls by means of their artforms.
Flying Embers, their inventive collaboration at the moment on view at Hyderabad’s Goethe Zentrum portrays actuality. On show is the Artist’s Book with Katharina’s drawings and Jameela’s Hindi/Urdu poems. translated into English. Combining artwork and poetry, they handle battle, feminine foeticide, abuse, exploitation and forceful marriage of younger ladies. The combined media displays comprising paper, material, cement and wire, have added elaborations within the type of calligraphy artwork by Mohammed Irfan.
For Irfan, a signboard artist who paints banners, doing calligraphy with a pen on a murals is a singular expertise. “It is an expression of art; the work looks easy but takes time,” he says. One of the challenges he confronted, whereas utilizing ink, was to make sure the great thing about strokes and that letters retain the textures. He shares, ““I learnt to read and write Urdu after I became a commercial artist to experience and understand the beauty of the language.”
How it began
This Indo-German venture began at a video assembly of artists and poets from India and Germany in April 2022. The digital interplay introduced all of them on “a platform to stand for peace, humanity and sustainability,” says Jameela, who despatched a number of poems to Katharina. Inspired to create a number of works, the German artist then got here to Hyderabad — her first go to to India — in January 2023.
Katharina informs by means of an electronic mail from Hamburg that the works have been created on the visitor home of the University of Hyderabad the place she stayed for 19 days. While right here she additionally carried out a workshop on Artists’ Books for first-year artwork college students on the college. “I was well received, had great fun and the workshop culminated in an exhibition at the Department of Fine Arts,” she says. Katharina, who studied visible communication and graphic design at FH Würzburg, and is a member of varied artist group and galleries in Germany.
With quite a few exhibitions in Germany, Europe and the US, Katharina says poetry has to maneuver her to translate it into artwork. “It was easy with these poems; they were so powerful and visual,” she provides. She works principally with ink and paper. While she attracts on every kind of paper — even on outdated e-book pages — she makes use of skinny, colored tissue or wrapping paper to create layers. “Chance is a large element of my creative process which I embrace and incorporate. These Artists’ Books consist of many drawings that I combine and collage on top of each other,” she explains her inventive course of.
She has purchased small items of festive material in Hyderabad and displayed them in distinction to the content material of the books. Katharina says, “Every a part of these books has a which means. The cowl of “Give me my milk, mom’ is a standard marriage ceremony material. The damaged cement items I’ve sewn into a cloth used for younger ladies social gathering clothes to cite the road ‘all my veins were filled with concrete”.
Founder of Shaheen Resource Centre for Women in Hyderabad, Jameela has published three collections of poetry and her work has been translated and featured in several notable anthologies, including Women Writing in India and In Their Own Voice. One of Jameela’s poems ‘ Mujhe doodh pilaa de maa, mujhe Kok me mat maar ( Give me my milk mom, Do not kill me in your womb), devoted to her mom, “is not a personal poem but has a political message in it,” says Jameela.
As a girl who has ‘lived through and processed pain,’ Katharina tapped into that effectively to create photographs for this e-book. She says, “Yes it was painful but also liberating to find an artistic outlet for feelings like these. The translation of this poem into art worked well. We had some touching experiences when we showed it at the recent Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF); looking at the book, some women started crying softly.”
Since Jameela and Katharina hail from totally different cultural backgrounds, was it straightforward to discover a frequent floor within the trigger to raised the place of girls? Katharina replies, “Since that fight sadly is international, it was easy to find a common ground. Jameela and I are both feminists and fighters. I wrote in our proposal for the HLF: we fight with poetry and art to change the world.”
Flying Embers is on at Goethe Zentrum in Hyderabad until March 6.
Source: www.thehindu.com