Dunya Kalantery and Rima Patel have been working together since 2020. They bonded through a shared passion for the mad genius of children, their anarchic energies, and creative education.
Their approach to The Brightness of JuJu has been a painstaking, excitable, but gentle relay race between Rima’s workshop in West Thamesmead and the children of Willow Bank and Harris Garrard primary schools; supporting and taking the lead from the creative direction of children wherever possible; not privileging one material over another; understanding the children they work with to be creative equals.
Rima Patel (born 1972)
Rima Patel is an artist, craftswoman and designer based in London.
She is co-founder of Rima & McRae, a multi-disciplinary fine and applied arts studio based in Plumstead, London.
Dunya Kalantery (born 1986) is an Iranian/Croatian artist, writer and educator born and based in London, UK.
Their work is concerned with working with/in ecologies; using matter and physical environments to explore displacement; belonging; plasticity; play; trauma and healing. Their practice spans sculptural objects, artist publications, film, sound and radio; and is fundamentally concerned with the power of narratives.
They practice is shaped through a fascination of what exists in the cross-pollination of people and places at the edge-lands; a deep sensitivity to place; co-operative organising; ecologies; ritual and radical education.
They understand their work with children to be a symbiotic process of learning and discovery. Often working collaboratively with children to create works of fact-and-fiction; utopian/dystopian alternatives that transform our relationship to our lived environment and create imagined alternatives which we can all occupy.
Their work has been supported nationally across arts spaces, institutions and organisations including; Tate Britain, MACBA, Create London, TACO!, Flat Time House, INIVA, Earlsmead Primary School, The Serpentine Marathon, The Barbican, Willow Bank Primary School, RTM.fm, The Cock Tavern, Wysing Arts Centre, Nottingham Contemporary, Bow Arts, Harris Garrard Academy, You Should See The Other Guy, Peabody Housing Association, Bexley Council, Haringey Council, Ferry Lane Primary School, ASP Fair.
(photo, Holly Black 2022)