The Mosaic Rooms

Lockdown Diaries: Over&Out is The Mosaic Rooms’ spring schools project for 2021.

Artists Aya Haidar and Marwan Kaabour worked with three local secondary schools to explore storytelling in contemporary art this year. What had the past year meant to young people? Using different story telling tools, students were invited to reflect and process their lived experience of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The project was inspired by artists who use different forms storytelling. It drew on art works in the Fehras Publishing Practices exhibition and of contemporary artists from the South West Asia and North Africa, art works that help to transport lived experience into narratives that are easier, which may help process challenging circumstances and emotions and offer new possibilities for the future. At the end of the project each student had a record of their stories. These works are on display at The Mosaic Rooms.

Lockdown Diaries: Over&Out followed on from The Mosaic Rooms 2020 schools project Together Apart which worked with students under the first Covid 19 lockdown in the UK. This second project marked a different moment one year later and encouraged the young people to look back on what they wished to remember.

Resources were released each week on The Mosaic Rooms’ Vimeo, and on the Lockdown Diaries: Over & Out project page.

Project partners

Lockdown Diaries: Over&Out project was devised in partnership with three local schools Kensington Aldridge Academy, Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and Holland Park School, and was shaped collaboratively with teachers from those schools to make sure that the project offered perspectives and activities that are not currently covered in the school curriculum.