Year 11 Artist -in- Residence Whitechapel Exhibition

The Year 10 GCSE art group attended the Whitechapel Gallery to celebrate the final exhibition of the artwork they had created alongside the artist Shiraz Bayjoo

The project was supported by the Whitechapel Gallery and it was entitled ‘The BB archive’. Its purpose was to engage a practising artist , Shiraz Bayjoo with a group of year 10 students in Bow, East London, exploring individual oral histories and notions of collective memory and place. It brought together the students’ own family stories of migration to East London, whilst setting them against a longer history of migration from the Common Wealth. The narratives were processed through artist Shiraz Bayjoo’s own method of simplifying and reformatting images and video as a series of emotionally and politically charged objects, photographs, videos and installations.

The archive will continue Shiraz Bayjoo’s personal exploration into collective, emerging identities and porous borders, bringing together the different methods he employs in his practice.

The project has been very successful as apart from having the opportunity to work with a contemporary practising artist and learn about different ways about producing artwork, the students have been able to create artwork of a very high standard which will help them achieve good grades at GCSE level