‘Making The Room Sing’ – Amanda Camenisch and Therese Westin with the Asian Women’s Resource Centre

Community Commissions and the Brent Biennial 2022

Community Commissions were a key part of the 2022 Brent Biennial, ‘In The House of My Love’. Partnerships were created with three groups across the borough: 

• Asian Women’s Resource Centre
• Sufra Foodbank and Kitchen North West London
• Mosaic LGBT+ Young Persons’ Trust.

Each commission started as a series of workshops to identify how artists could work alongside staff and community members to address an important desire within their work and lives. The projects were community-led; the communities connected to these three organisations wrote the briefs and selected the artists who they would work with.

About Making The Room Sing

Making The Room Sing was an exhibition by artists Amanda Camenisch and Therese Westin, developed in collaboration with a group of women from the Asian Women’s Resource Centre (AWRC). Over six months the artists and women worked together to make textiles, sculpture, instruments and sounds. These were then turned into an exhibition at the Metroland Studios gallery.

The commission sought to honour and celebrate the safe space that AWRC has created over their forty-year history, by providing support, safety and hospitality for women experiencing domestic and gender-based violence in Brent and beyond.

Following the exhibition during the biennial in 2022, several key elements of the installation were taken to AWRC to be on display and used by the community around the centre.

About the artists

Amanda Camenisch is an artist and energy healer. Her practice includes photography, film, sculpture and performance. In what she calls “participatory rituals”, she aims to create spaces that allow for active imagination and play to take place. Amanda has often worked with vulnerable groups. She has facilitated instrument building workshops from recycled materials together with refugees and Greek musicians in Athens and has worked on collaborative image making practices together with sex workers. In 2019 she started the project THE SPIRAL, open circles for ventures into hidden landscapes, in which she facilitates open circles, meditation groups, workshops and retreats.

Website: www.amandacamenisch.com

Therese Westin is an artist working with performance, movement and writing. She is also a yoga teacher, facilitating workshops, group classes and individual yoga therapy sessions. Therese spent two years teaching for Ourmala, UK charity offering yoga to refugees and asylum seekers in conjunction with the British Red Cross and Support a Survivor of Torture. Therese has also facilitated workshops in her role as an artist; conducting a weeklong workshop in Athens inviting members of the public to create flags whilst engaging in conversations surrounding nation states, borders and migration. The workshop culminated in a procession of the flags through the streets of Athens.

About AWRC

Asian Women’s Resource Centre (AWRC) is a grassroots “led by and for” charity specialising in delivering services for black and minority ethnic women experiencing domestic abuse. Established in 1980 in Brent, they offer culturally sensitive practical and emotional support in 24 languages, including information on housing, legal advice, access to counselling and advocacy.

Website: www.asianwomencentre.org.uk

About the commission

The brief

Responding to a brief that was collaboratively written as a response to the desires of staff members and service users with support of artist and facilitator A’lshah Waheed, artists Amanda Camenisch and Therese Westin were selected by the AWRC to develop and deliver a series of workshops for the production of a collective artwork to be installed permanently at their safe house based in Harlesden, Brent.

The selected project, titled Making The Room Sing, sought to honour the safe space that AWRC has created throughout its forty year history by providing support, safety and hospitality for women in Brent and beyond.

The exhibition

Bringing together textiles, sculpture, instruments and sound produced collaboratively with a group of women over six months, the exhibition at Metroland Cultures during the Brent Biennial 2022 was an opportunity to showcase the culmination of this co-creative practice and to highlight the need for empowerment and healing for women experiencing the hostility of domestic and gender-based violence.

Central to the installation was a textile piece woven with self-made textiles and materials. Containing symbols, images and stories that have appeared in guided meditations, art-making exercises and letter writing, the wall piece brings together the women’s dreams and wishes through the visual and metaphorical motif of a communal garden. Additional elements were added to the final installed work at AWRC, including two sections of 11 moonstone beads each featuring 11 affirmations brought forward by the women. Alongside the soft ringing of clay bells hanging at the bottom of the textile, the artists and women imagined that the artwork would function as a sort of altarpiece; an on-going site for meditation and healing.

Accompanying the textile work was a series of sculptures, including four elemental harps fabricated from the looms that were used for the production of the altarpiece. The instruments were activated during two workshops with the public over the course of the exhibition, recreating some of the exercises that were run with the women to hold space and create synergy in the group. Poetry and drawings resulting from these sessions also featured as part of the installation in a book and projected on a wall; sound compositions can be listened to while walking through the exhibition or sitting down on a bespoke sound healing bench in the shape of a lying woman, inviting both rest and contemplation.

Also hung on the walls were six silk robes, alluding to the bodies that carried them and those that may carry them going forward, invoking the women who participated in the production of the artworks and those who might benefit from them in the future.

After the exhibition

Following the exhibition, the textile work and bench were housed at AWRC’s newly-refurbished building. The instruments and robes continue to facilitate opportunities for performances and healing sessions at AWRC and with other groups who experience hostile environments.

You can read more about the exhibition on the original event page.

Making The Room Sing was commissioned as part of the Brent Biennial 2022, titled ‘In the House of my Love’. The second edition of the Biennial asked how, and why, the act of making home can be a form of resistance and survival within the context of hostile environments—including those of racism, homophobia, ableism, climate catastrophe and political austerity. The Brent Biennial 2022 was curated by Eliel Jones, in collaboration with a curatorial committee comprised of artists Adam Farah, Abbas Zahedi and Jamila Prowse. Find out more by visiting the Archive.