Jumanah Bawazir, a student with AA Diploma 12, will have a project completed during her Diploma studies exhibited at the P21 gallery until the 10 October as part of their ‘ReACT' programme, which has been established to promote and support emerging and student artists whose work is dedicated to or inspired by the Middle East & Arab world.

Bawazir’s project, ‘Permanent Transience, is an architectural tool for the communication of narratives on hold. The exhibition’s intervention focuses on the limbo period after fleeing a country and before resettlement.

‘For this project, artist Jumanah Bawazir worked with Somali women looking at the various holding places they had been occupying. “In the context of Somali women on their journeys to Europe, how do we create a process deployed in these transient moments, that builds a tool that communicates their narratives?”. Through conducting interviews, virtually reconstructing experiences, and using poetry together with the interviewees, the project aims to empower and humanize the interviewees whilst functioning as a holding to account to governments operating under the European surveillance systems that are inevitably controlling their journeys.

The film, ‘Permanent Transience’ - Narratives on Hold,’ focuses on one Somali woman’s specific journey illustrating how her narrative is one of 3.3 million in a state of limbo, addressing the government surveillance systems that have perpetuated these limbo periods, holding these power structures accountable while also providing a platform for participants to reappropriate and take control of their own narratives.’

View the exhibition