Taking place 2018-2022, Transforming Narratives is an international programme, supporting creative and cultural practitioners and cultural organisations in Birmingham to engage in cultural and creative exchange with artists and organisations in cities in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The project offers a range of platforms for new artistic voices and exchanging narratives around contemporary lived experience across the three countries and will build meaningful and enduring relationships between the cultural sectors/ecologies in Birmingham, Pakistan and Bangladesh for now and the future.
The project has five strands of activity:
- Artistic programme
- Cultural leadership development
- Community consultation and engagement
- Archiving
- Critical exchange and dialogue
Transforming Narratives is managed by Culture Central, and delivered in partnership with The British Council and 10 Birmingham-based cultural partners. It is supported by Arts Council England.
The aims of Transforming Narratives are:
- To carry out an exploration of identities, stories and cities through an ambitious artistic exchange programme. Develop a new generation of artists, creative producers and cultural leaders from Pakistan, Bangladesh and within Birmingham’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.
- To provide development opportunities to showcase innovative but lesser known and less established artists practicing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and in Birmingham.
- Reshape our understanding of arts practice, city place-making and creative engagement with diversity.
- To develop an international cultural programme through an audience-led approach, placing community consultation and engagement at the heart of the development process to ensure the programme has meaning and relevance to local communities; encouraging more engagement with the arts within those communities.
- To strengthen and develop sustainable cultural relationships between Birmingham’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and contemporary society in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
- Create new narratives and telling old stories through a contemporary lens, which have resonance in all three places.
- Through international exchange working with Bangladesh and Pakistan, to support more creative dialogue and collaboration between larger and smaller cultural organisations/creative practitioners/artists across different parts of Birmingham leading to a collective, shared cultural offer as an international city.
- Reach diverse audiences using new technologies and digital engagement.