We welcome audiences to join Skimstone Arts for our launch event for Refugee Week 2024 11:20am on Friday 21st June at Newcastle University XL Gallery, Fine Art Building (King Edward VII Building). The Programme will include:

Shirley and the gang
Live music performance at 11:30am and 12pm

Shirley and the gang are a music band of hopeful refugees who love to play music and meet with Skimstone Arts at St Peter’s Church on Wednesdays. Together we make songs about what hopes and choices we have in life….or not. “Life is not Rwanda, life is to hope for a good situation where we can work and be reunited with our families. Life is no more war and to live in peace. Hope is to find peace in UK.”

​Temporal;Visitations;Dwelling Place Exhibition

Meet the Photographer 1pm

Photographer/artist Shaho Omar has documented his own and others  temporary experiences of having to navigate what is ‘home’. He has personally had to move three times in one year and continues to live in fear of being transferred again somewhere else unknown to him. “Someone else decides about your life, your psychological and emotional stability and where you live.” This commissioned exhibition is a collection of photographic images of temporary residences, briefly or sometimes more permanently inhabited, reflecting his own narrative, alongside other asylum seekers and refugees in the North East.

 With Windows Open Wide 
Audio recordings and installation

Skimstone Arts’ Freeflow Creativity Cafe’s brought together a wonderful diversity of people, including residents in Newcastle and those with lived refugee experience. Together we collaborated and co created a range of poetry about the theme of HOME, which was then recorded at Blank Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne. One collective poem from Freeflow was made into a stand alone artwork using Letterpress with Northern Print.

Exhibitions and installation 21st June – 2nd July 10 am – 5pm