ANTOINETTE
BROWN
Migrating Dreams and Nightmares exhibition series. Goldsmiths University, London & Warwick University, Warwickshire. 2015 -2016
The Department of Sociology's Methods Lab, Mariam Motamedi Fraser and Dr. Nirmal Puwar with artists Antoinette Brown and Sadek Rahim, a collaboration to curate and create an exhibition and series of events responding to 'A Seventh Man' by John Berger and Jean Mohr as well as the theme Migrating Dreams + Nightmares: movement + materials.
Words and images from A Seventh Man, which was translated into different languages, have been re-enacted in the Kingsway Corridor by artist Antoinette Brown in collaboration with Nirmal Puwar. Chalk, blackboards and wire jolt the words out of the book and onto the walls of the academy. Contemporary graffiti from Larache’s harbour sits among selections from the book. In addition, Sadek Rahim’s sponge boats from his project No Crash! Boom! Bang!, originally installed in the Bibliothèque Nationale d'Alger, hang in the arches of the passageway.
In a linked-in off-site exhibition in the Stuart Hall Library Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta have responded to Berger and Mohr’s book and Syed’s longstanding interest in tunnels to examine the hopes and fears driving the movements of current migrants and refugees.
Unravelling (2008, 17 mins) is the result of a unique film-making process, creatively working with poetry, archive materials, visual art and music. Internationally acclaimed Nitin Sawhney composed a new score and artist Antoinette Brown created a series of artworks in response to an original inter-generational poetic dialogue in Urdu between Sawarn Singh, a WWII Indian soldier who fought for the British in Burma, the Middle East and Africa, before moving to the UK, and his grandson, Kuldip Powar. Through poetic motifs a sensory experience emerges, both evocative and haunting, inviting us to explore our own ambivalences towards collective and personal stories of war.
Cinema III (2009/9mins) funded by the British Academy, made by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharm. Produced with Ioanna Karavela in a close collaborative relationship with sound artist Shervin Shaeri, cinematographers Des & Tom Seal, visual artist Antoinette Brown, film editor Domina Favata, as well as the voices of community activists Jitey Samra, Erskine Howell and Ann Small; each of whom have differing intimate relationships to the cinema which has sat as a ruin for over twenty years, is due for demolition and was at one time a thriving South Asian cinema, owned by forty shareholders in the post-war period.
