Anouk Verviers
About
- Anouk is engaged in an art practice focused on socially engaged art projects and rooted in the desire to rethink prevalent models of interactions, care, and connectedness. Her projects aspire to carve out space for conversations. Conversations in which individualities are combined in new and different ways and through which words attempt and fail to recreate the world. Creating installations blending video, ceramics, performance, woodworking, and drawing, Anouk strives to translate the sensations left by these exchanges to the exhibition space.
- Anouk is pursuing her MFA at Goldsmiths in London UK, and holds a BA in visual and media arts from UQAM in Montréal CA. Her practice developed through art residencies in Canada (Vaste et Vague, Regart, 3e Impérial, Vrille) and Switzerland (Dogo residenz für Neue Kunst). Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada (Regart, À l’est de vos empires, Vaste et Vague) and in group shows in Canada (Art Mûr Gallery, St-Lambert Art Fair, LSB Gallery), Switzerland (Dogo), and in the United Kingdom (Hypha Studios). She is an artist-researcher within the Research Centre for Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at St-Paul University in Ottawa, CA.
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About the project
In 2018, working in education, I felt the need to take action through my art practice by creating the project Au milieu des bureau empilés (In Between Desks) to question notions of power, expertise, and credibility within the current debate on education. The basic framework for Au milieu des bureaux empilés (In Between Desks) relies on a set of foldable chairs I built that I carry from one school to another. By bringing these chairs to Harris Girls Academy East Dulwich, I aim to create a conversational space that students can inhabit and fill with the topics and issues that are meaningful to them, as well as experiment with new forms of exchange based on care and creativity. The project gives students the possibility to develop a sense of agency. They are both exchanging experiences and ideas while being attentive to how the exchange is evolving and how the group is doing. Together with the students, we will have drawing workshops to draw the structures of our exchanges. These drawings will collectively help us understand the power dynamics, relationships, support networks, etc., that will be arising through our weekly conversations. Audio excerpts of their exchanges, chosen by students, will join the 252 pieces of conversations accessible online on the website of the project www.aumilieudesbureauxempiles.com The website displays a network of voices that students themselves chose to release to the public because they wanted their experiences, ideas, and knowledge to be shared and heard. To this date, Au milieu des bureau empilés (In Between Desks) involved 105 students from 12 schools in Canada, Switzerland, and now, the United Kingdom. |
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