Counterpoints Arts

The selected artists, Paria Goodarzi and Francisco Llinas Casas, respond to contemporary social, political and cultural issues by examining the hybrid condition of our society and the formation, performance and representation of identity.
 
Having been born in Iran and Venezuela respectively, their work draws inspiration from the lived experiences of migration and diaspora. Their practice is research-based and multidisciplinary, often taking the shape of socially-engaged art projects, participatory art and performance pieces.

Their new commission, Alter, consists of seven movable house sculptures, featuring movement-activated sounds and lights. While the sculptures are manoeuvred by both performers and the audience in a choreographic walk, the outside space of the Southbank Centre will be filled with traces of sound and colour, representing the stories of migration and displacement.

Counterpoints Arts and the Southbank Centre are collaborating because we share important values:

• We support artists to share their vision and imagination with the world in their own words. Refugees and migrants make significant contributions to our arts, culture and society which often go unrecognised. They have multiple perspectives that often combine different languages, geographies and cultural perspectives, resulting in new ways of seeing and questioning.
• We believe in making and supporting inclusive work that makes connections across artforms and brings people and communities closer together.
• We believe in the potential for art to inspire social change.
• We believe art has the power to unite us, to heal us, to challenge us, to inspire us – and we want to create a fair, safe space for this to happen, that all can engage with.
• We believe in democratising the use of public space, in removing the barriers to accessing our work, and in collaborating with artists and communities to make decisions together. 
• We believe in collaborating with care, for artists, staff and audiences.