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Public Sphere

Khaver Idrees

Based in London, Khaver's work seeks to blur the boundaries between art and life.Social engagement/participation is an essential element in her research-based practice, embodying the First Law of Thermodynamics.This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one state to another. Her socially engaged/participartoy work seeks to turn negative energy into positive thus resisting the Political climate.

As well as being a Leverhulme Scholar at the Royal College of Art, she has been an Aesthetica Creative works finalist and commissions include #Idrawaline UN Women UK and Beyond the Frame, Warner Textile Achive, Essex County Council.

Selected exhibitions: 

The Partisan Club, Coventry Biennale of Contemporary Art

On Being Together: memberships, collectives and unions, The Partisan Club,Beaconsfield Gallery

The Habibi Project, Nottingham Contemporary

Nour Art Festival, Barakat Trust

Ovada Seven Counties Open 

302_redirect CAP Festival

ICA Daily collaboration 

Mal(e)feacance, Ugly Duckling

Alchemy, The Southbank Centre      

 

 

Contact

07990804319

https://www.instagram.com/khaveridrees/

Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Public Sphere

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;It matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe desciptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Donna. J. Haraway

By unpicking the selvedge of the rational and irrational, Khaver's work seeks to rebalance and re-imagine received narratives through the subjugated voice. Just as tea cannot be made with tea leaves alone without water, one cannot understand the self without interrogating the social, political,psycho-geography as well as the stories and silence from the past. 

The interrogation takes place through a diverse practice encompassing performance, writing, drawing, painting, installation and social engagement. The act of repetition is ritualised and becomes a nod to the wellbeing of the individual and collective. Pulling out the threads of insanity, trauma, the monstrous, the sacred and love of one time and place and transposing them to another, it witnesses the historical resonance of the transnational movement of ideas, objects and people.

The work not only challenges the existing narratives but attempts to bring a shared heritage to the fore, celebrating complexity and interconnectivity as a way forward to making history.

Act I — The Shire
Conceived during Brexit born in Lock down, this is a series of love letters from an asylum. Deranged in four acts,each act is a different phase of a sequence of the fragment's journey to find it's whole.The sequence is essential and the only linear aspect of the journey. Each act is only an abstract of the whole.The whole can only be found when the fragment has undergone a witnessing of the violence it has encountered in its various forms,from physical to the use of language.

The witnessing takes place through appropriation and British values, constantly weaving through the individual and the collective.

Medium:

Video

Size:

15.35 min
ColonialismGender PoliticsHysteriaLockdownlovemadnessNational identityProtestracismResistenceTraumaviolence
Act II — Myths and Legends
Conceived during Brexit, born in Lock down, this is a series of love letters from an asylum. Deranged in four acts,each act is a different phase of a sequence of the fragment's journey to find it's whole.The sequence is essential and the only linear aspect of the journey. Each act is only an abstract of the whole. The whole can only be found when the fragment has undergone a witnessing of the violence it has encountered in its various forms,from physical to the use of language.

The witnessing takes place through appropriation and British values, constantly weaving through the individual and the collective.

Medium:

video

Size:

14.11 min
Act III — Alchemy
Conceived during Brexit, born in Lock down, this is a series of love letters from an asylum. Deranged in four acts,each act is a different phase of a sequence of the fragment's journey to find it's whole.The sequence is essential and the only linear aspect of the journey. Each act is only an abstract of the whole. The whole can only be found when the fragment has undergone a witnessing of the violence it has encountered in its various forms,from physical to the use of language.

The witnessing takes place through appropriation and British values, constantly weaving through the individual and the collective.

Medium:

video

Size:

11.08 min
Act IV — The Holy Grail
Conceived during Brexit, born in Lock down, this is a series of love letters from an asylum. Deranged in four acts,each act is a different phase of a sequence of the fragment's journey to find it's whole.The sequence is essential and the only linear aspect of the journey. Each act is only an abstract of the whole. The whole can only be found when the fragment has undergone a witnessing of the violence it has encountered in its various forms,from physical to the use of language.

The witnessing takes place through appropriation and British values, constantly weaving through the individual and the collective.

Medium:

video

Size:

22.07 min

The Leverhulme Trust

Leverhulme Scholarship Recipient

Website:

https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/

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