Before going to the Street Children Exhibition at El Sawy Cultural Wheel, I wondered what these children deem as “beautiful and if self-expression can truly qualify as a proper motivation for an artistic endeavor.
The exhibition is organized by UNICEF in collaboration with several NGOs working with street children.
The first thing one notices is the drastic difference between works by children from NGOs and street children-differences in colors, composition, structure and choice of subject.
Those children who were not “institutionalized seem to have a more radical, immediate sense of color and composition. There is almost a brutal choice of color and a distorted, free-floating composition.
Despite the varying age group, the children seem to show an acute sense of color and perspective, altering form and perspective to express a particular feeling or mood. And while they are hindered by their complete lack of study, this urgent sense of the need for communication makes up for any technical inadequacy they might have.
For those who were “institutionalized, their exhibited work shows unique understanding of pictorial and artistic processes and problems. One in particular was almost an exercise in pointillism. But many others were just the innocent scribbling of children.
Not going beyond simplistic and naïve drawing, their choice of subject seems to be directly informed by their teachers or immediate caretakers.
The exhibition comes as no surprise amid the recent rise of the social relevancy of art – as well as notions such as “art in the service of the community and children being a priority on the development agenda. The agenda that seems to dictate what kind of vision art should go by and what kinds of aims art should fulfill.
The functionalist, almost reformist, approach to art however should not undermine or overshadow our appreciation of such a breakthrough for a marginalized segment of society. What these children presented was an exceptional insight in a reality that is fraught with despair, trauma, neglect and an incredible potential that remains to be realized.
