Once together: a global-curated project
Engagement with our current 2020 global crisis from a multifaceted perspective.
Twenty + One Interdisciplinary, woman artists and creative practitioners from across the globe came together to share concerns and to engage with various issues within a shared space created for safe and open exchanges. We met twice every week starting in July and continue to support each other and create.
Curated by Ina Kaur, the participants brought about the interpretations of diverse issues that they experienced in their day to day and their unique translation of this through their creative expressive works in all possible genres. Each work in the collection tells a story of the times we live in, our complex fragmented yet our collective experience that, when put together, form a narrative that helped us navigate through these difficult times.
Some of the things, which inspired and steered this project, were:
1) In these uncertain times of social distancing, which we all share, how did we connect, engage, and collaborate?
2) Creating and nurturing a space where we could truly share and openly discuss what it was that affected (and perhaps, continued to affect us) the most.
Minna Resnick's Nothing is Normal II
This pandemic has brought to the surface realities about many additional parallel crises. Some of those crises are: environmental imbalance with nature's depletion; social insecurity, inequity, and violence; political unrest and greed, along with our individual and community health (psychological, emotional, mental, and physical) that have all been compromised.
The project allowed for building community and archiving through visual documentation of these times as an outcome. Capturing many artists' and practitioners’ unique perspective on this global pandemic crisis, and how it has been affecting us all, supported our creative expressions and in many ways helped us make more sense of the quiet chaos that was unfolding in our lives. We all come from all walks of life and from many continents across the world. Through the artist's creative responses and through reflections, this project presented itself as an opportunity to come together, to share, to paint, to write, to build a community to allow us all to reflect, accept, express, laugh, cry, scream, complaint and have fun in this accepting place we all were "once together".
- Ina Kaur, July 2020