The ground-breaking project Transforming Narratives was launched in Birmingham in March 2019 to promote collaboration between artists based in the city and across the globe in Bangladesh and Pakistan. And for its first year, the programme funded artists travelling across the three destinations to explore ideas and create new work. Then Covid-19 struck, putting future plans in jeopardy.
Unable to bring artists and creators together in person because of the pandemic, the Transforming Narratives team went online, launching an ambitious new digital collaboration scheme which has seen more than 100 artists working across 17 projects.
Also read: Everything you need to know about ‘Concert from Bangladesh’
And the results have included film, music, dance, spoken word, crafts, visual arts, podcasts, photography and debates - bringing together international creativity in a way the programme could never have imagined.
Now the team have created a new short film showcasing the digital projects and taking viewers into studios, villages and outdoor spaces as far afield as Lahore, Dhaka and Birmingham.
Transforming Narratives project director Sophina Jagot says the team realised they were facing an immense challenge with the pandemic but were determined to continue to support artists.
“From the beginning, the vision for Transforming Narratives was about creative and cultural exchange between Birmingham and cities in Pakistan and Bangladesh for the mutual benefit of all three places and we had been doing that through various projects,” she says. “We were about a week away from going live with the open call for the final part of the programme when Covid hit.
“With the pandemic, we were very aware that it was a really difficult time for artists and creatives in all three countries and we really wanted to spread a bit of hope and provide a space for expression.
“We talked to our funders and steering board and got agreement to repurpose some of the budget to trial digital collaborative grants. We would still be funding artistic work and it still had to follow the same principles of Transforming Narratives, in being collaboration between at least two of the three countries and multi art form, but it would now be digital.”
The team allocated £75,000 towards the grants and put out a call for project applications – and were inundated. They selected 17 projects, all of which brought together artists from at least two of the respective countries but with many featuring participants from all three.
“We wanted to see a variety of art forms and we had literature, painting, theatre, film, spoken word, creating soundscapes and many more,” Sophina continues. “We also wanted to see a mixture of artists and organisations and what was really positive was that we had a lot of new people apply, artists who hadn’t previously engaged with us.
“The guidance we gave was that it could be a response to the pandemic or a response to what the world looks like now and the key thing is that these projects were artist-led.”
Each work was a specific response to the circumstances says project co-ordinator Nushin Hussain.
“For example, ANGON was a vodcast with the lead advocate from Bangladesh and with speakers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Birmingham and the conversations which took place were amazing and so insightful.
“Another project was I Don’t Know You, You Don’t Know Me, with Shehzad Chowdhury as the lead advocate in Bangladesh and Mahtab Hussain from Birmingham. They had never met before and they got to know each other through Instagram where on a weekly basis they set a theme and responded to each other through a digital letter and a creative artwork. It was really thought-provoking and gave them a chance to explore each other’s cultures and reflect on life.
“Baasi News looked at newspapers from the pandemic but they were being repurposed, so in the cultures of Pakistan and Bangladesh they use newspapers for a second purpose such as wrapping up food, and the artists were looking at how the pandemic therefore became stale news.
“We were also able to reach rural villages, so we had a project in Bangladesh called Shakti (Feminine Power) where women in Sreepur who made crafts collaborated with Sampad in Birmingham and they taught their crafts to artists in Birmingham and artists in Birmingham taught them their skills.
“The Bangladeshi women involved in this project come from highly disadvantaged backgrounds. Through digital collaborative grants we had the opportunity to offer them a platform, and it ended up being such a rich exchange for the group in terms of skills and ideas.”
One of the projects, CollaborArtists brought together eight artists from Birmingham, Bangladesh and Pakistan in creating a single artwork. It was produced by Birmingham-based Amrit Singh, whose multicoloured artworks created under the name MrASingh, have been exhibited across the country with works displayed in London, Edinburgh Worcester, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Windsor and his home city.
For Amrit, the project was a new direction.
“I’ve always wanted to do a collaborative project and the idea of working with artists across the world was a real opportunity, I have never done it before. It was a real learning curve and a massive experimentation to see what would happen. The grant was for a collaborative project and we focused around the word isolation – asking our artists the question what does isolation mean to you?”
Amrit interviewed over 20 artists and was looking for more than just talent.
“It was really important that they could work together as it’s collaborative and they have to be sensitive to each other and I found the perfect group. I remember the first group meeting and they were all timid and shy and yet many of them were world-leading artists.
“Together we were creating an artwork in which I sent each artist a random line but they had no idea what the line represented. The only expectation was they had to make that line stand out, whatever they created. We had different artists – watercolour, charcoal, mixed media.”
Amrit’s seemingly random lines joined to create an image, bringing all of these distanced artists together.
“I didn’t tell them until right at the final showcase event when we put it all together and then they realised and the reaction was fantastic, seeing all their styles linking together.”
As a filmmaker, Amrit had also mentored each of the artists in recording their process and he then brought all of their individual clips together into a single film.
“I’m a perfectionist but I had no control over what was recorded and that was the beauty of this project – working with, and putting faith in, strangers to tell their story and showcase what they wanted to share.”
Amrit says the project has been a real eye-opener.
“For me, the two words which sum up this project are opportunity and triumph. The biggest thing I have learnt is that the world is very small now, there is no reason we can’t commission artists from around the world. I think before this we always thought it would be too difficult to do that.
“It’s also nice to be giving a voice to those who are like us, brown people from countries similar to those from where our parents are from, and we’d always thought we couldn’t do that. But now I can look at how I amplify the voices from creatives around the world and bring them together.”
Amrit is also creating the showcase film for the entire digital collaboration programme, featuring each of the 17 projects.
“You can’t tell the entire story of each project but it’s highlighting each one so the viewer can see who was involved and what they were doing and they can then go and view them in more detail on the Transforming Narratives website.”
Transforming Narratives is managed by Culture Central, supported by Arts Council England and delivered in collaboration with The British Council. Originally envisioned as a three-year project, it has now been extended for a further year. The team are hoping the showcase film not only highlights the amazing work undertaken during the pandemic but also encourages new artists to apply for future grants.
“These projects resulted in such incredible work, we wanted to create something long-lasting with this film – something which shows what can be done,” says Sophina. “Each grant was up to £4,000 so when you look at the projects, the work created and the amount of people involved it’s incredible.
“Transforming Narratives has huge ideas of what it will achieve but you don’t always see all the results until a lot later. A large part of this project is about creating networks and promoting research and development. It’s about trying things out and this was a great space to play and experiment. I hope these digital projects are the beginning of new collaborations which can be realised in a much bigger way going forwards.”
The digital programme is already bearing additional fruit with two of the artists now joining the Transforming Narratives Leadership Programme and some of the projects continuing beyond the initial grant, working with new partners to develop into the future.
The team are now working towards a festival in 2022. Whether that will be in person or digital is still undecided but whichever route is possible they are confident the results will continue to be fascinating.
“There are so few chances to work together across different countries and with the UK, so this has been really significant in some of the ways artists work,” says Sophina. “These digital collaborative grants have made it possible for them to work in a new way and, as a programme, we have learnt so much about how we can better support artists and creatives.”
Nushin believes the project has created long-lasting change.
“I feel like we were on a journey with all these artists and creatives. Especially when the pandemic first happened, it was a time when it was so difficult to see how the artists could come together but digital collaboration has allowed so many artists to think outside of the box.
“The project has shown how we can collaborate with people on the other side of the world, and we can collaborate as artists even if we can’t be together - you can do film, theatre, dance, you don’t have to be on stage together.
“We were in a new world and it’s a world of opportunities. This has shown how we can adapt and how we can work without limiting ourselves. I feel in the future artists will be inspired by this idea of digital collaboration across the world.
“We had no idea what to expect and the content we saw was such a high quality. It showed us how the world is knit together and now we are connected a lot more than before - you can reach anyone, nothing is impossible any more. It’s been an interesting and inspiring journey.”
For more on Transforming Narratives see https://www.transformingnarratives.com/
To view the showcase film see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfLyy1lGppw
