Offscreen Art
Offscreen was founded by four artists, Al Braithwaite, Henry Hemming, Stephen Stapleton & Georgie Weedon, following a 1 year journey across the Middle East in 2003.
The resulting body of paintings, collages, sculptures, photographs and films were collated into Offscreen the book (Booth Clibborn Editions 2004) and exhibited as 'Offscreen Art ' at exhibitions in Tehran, Amman, London, Oslo, Muscat, Amsterdam and New York.
"For all of us the words Middle East conjure images, like anyone else, we'd read about it in newspapers, seen it on the telly and the pictures we saw were all terrorism, desert, oil and fear. And we had distant, hard-to-place images of Ali Baba, flying carpets and funny-looking water pipes being smoked by men wearing red-felt hats. We were distant and that was the premise. We had to get closer, to see what happened when the broadcast finished, to get ourselves Offscreen."
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This is the story of a journey. In September 2002 - September 2003, four young artists decided to spend a year making art in the Middle East, covering 20,000 miles in a studio-cum-truck called Yasmine, moving between Istanbul, Tehran, Dubai and Musqat, Sana'a, Jeddah and Amman, Cairo, Damascus and Beirut before going to Baghdad and Jerusalem.
They made paintings, installations, video footage, collage, sound-recordings, photographs and stories, working anywhere that would hold them, mosques, churches, kebaberies or markets, living rooms or bedrooms. On rooftops and beaches, mountains and one ski slope.
What they were beginning to do was get to know a place first-hand, and communicate this experience as beautifully and honestly as possible.
And this is at the heart of everything Offscreen stands for.