Volpower Digital Exhibition Artists Work

Due to Covid-19, our planned exhibition in a European location had to be moved and delivered online, and we sought out digital artists to help us create our digital VOLPOWER exhibition. Working with our curator, Dr Maggie Laidlaw, our artists, Dr Alper Kirklar & Dr Ivo Furman, Holly Summerson, and Studio Informal, were invited to engage with our volunteers’ photographic, video, collage and poetic creations, and to advance the ideas already woven through the various media to add richness to our VOLPOWER volunteer stories.

Our artists capture, in creative forms, facets of our volunteer everyday lives and personal narratives, and weave them into inventive audio visual journeys foregrounding our volunteers’ everyday accounts of inclusion, migration, diversity and empowerment. The final works created by the artists are inspired by, and consist of works by our volunteers, and all include notions of time, belonging and inclusion within the context of geographic and cultural (re)location.

Artists Contributed

Holly Summerson

Studio Informal

Dr Ivo Furman & Dr Alper Kirkland

Holly Summerson

holly-summerson-image

Holly is freelance animator and designer specialising in mixed-media, experimental and community art. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a degree in animation in 2019, and has since been accepted onto the Glasgow Film Talent Mentorship Scheme 2020.

Visit the locations on the Volpower Gallery Map to see short animations created from volunteers’ poetry, photography, collage and film. The videos bring together volunteers’ different expressions of community, sharing, diversity, identity and place, finding connections across countries and cultures. The animations are also connected to each other, as part of an interactive map that can be explored from anywhere.

Studio Informal

studioinformallogo

Studio Informal is based out of Tehran, Iran and aims to explore new narratives using video and sound.

These audio-visual pieces deal with the notions of time and inclusion by drawing inspiration from works of Volpower volunteers representing narratives of the everyday, geographical and cultural relocation, temporality and literary/artistic expressivity.

All the ways

Guided by Asia De Lorenzi’s poetry “All the ways”, this audio-visual piece combines imagery of Volpower volunteers in forms of one-second-a-day videos and visual diary with representation of a non-linear clock. Through creative use of sound and image, narratives of time are explored within the context of diaspora such as notions of ‘flow’ and ‘stillness’ as mentioned in Asia’s poetry.

I Am…

The collage works of Volpower volunteers form the starting point for this piece to explore the concept of time, particularly temporality of experiences as means of social coordination. Informed by this process, Amy Daly’s collage, a complement to her poem “Strong & Confident” becomes the first narrative of the “I am…” series which represent an instructional practice in Volpower poetry workshops. The second and third pieces, directly inspired by poems of Fatema and Anna, experiment with narratives of sound and image in order to accompany and ideally complement the poetry.

Togetherness

This piece is an attempt to explore the notion of inclusion, specifically the notion of individuality within a social context, by representing poetries of Serena and Adewale through intertwining music, collage and imagery.


Dr Ivo Furman & Dr Alper Kirkland

ivo-furman

Dr. Ivo Furman is assistant professor and graduate program director at Istanbul Bilgi  University’s department of Media. He completed his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College,  University of London in 2015. His research has been supported by numerous institutions  including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Danish Agency for Science  and Higher Education, Turkish Science and Technology Foundation (TUBITAK) and Stiftung  Mercator. He is co-editor of the upcoming volume “Politics of Culture in Contemporary  Turkey” (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). This is his second media art collaboration, the  first being “Six Mosaics of Participation for Gezi”, a digital gallery for the AHRC sponsored  project, “Aesthetics of Protest: Visual Culture and Communication in Turkey”.

alper_kirklar

Dr. Alper Kırklar is a professor of media and documentary filmmaker based in İstanbul. His recent area of work is focused on implementation of documentary practices to social media and interactive storytelling. He is currently a faculty member of Istanbul Bilgi University School of Communication.

The following videos are built on the creative efforts of the Volpower participants. By articulating assorted content pieces, we tried to comprehend and reflect the notion of medium specificity and collaborative storytelling. The main idea of these video works is to treat them as discrete yet interconnected elements which are produced during Volpower workshops.

BLUE LIKE AN OCEAN

POEM by:
Fatema

Image and Video Credits:
A.C, A.Z, Adewale, Aisha, Aisha, Amy Daly, Anna, Fatema, I.T, Khalid, L.H, Leo Muhammed, Marjan, Miriam, Mote, Valentina

Music:
You Tube Music Library

BLUE TALK

POEM by:
Serena

Image and Video Credits:
Rebecca, Asia De Lorenzi, L.H, Marian, Leo Muhammed, A.C, Amy Daly. Fatema

Music:
You Tube Music Library

HUMANITY

POEM by:
Anisa

Image and Video Credits:
Asia De Lorenzi

Volpower volunteers discuss their training event in Zagreb, Croatia. June 2019

Music:
You Tube Music Library

BUBBLE OF HAPPINESS

POEM by:
Amra

Image and Video Credits:
L.S, Amy Daly, L.H, Asia De Lorenzi, Aisha

Music:
You Tube Music Library

Blissful?

POEM by:
Mofe

Image and Video Credits:
Neva, A.C, I.T, Mofe Obawole, Khalid

Music:You Tube Music Library

Communion