Arts & Culture
Building bridges
Published 14 June 2007
An art show organised by Kids Company explores the gulf between rich and poor. Sarah O'Connor meets the young participants
A small girl creeps through a disused building in Shoreditch, her white shoes leaving patterns in the dust. She hears something and presses herself to the bare brick wall, frozen. The building echoes with her scream, which quickly turns to laughter as she and the girls who have grabbed her collapse into giggles. "Now it's my turn to hide!" squeals one, with a quick glance at the camera filming them.
These girls are part of a project backed by Kids Company, the charity for disadvantaged children, based in south-east London, which caught the attention of the art world when its 2004/ 2005 "Shrinking Childhoods" show replicated an inner-city neighbourhood at Tate Modern.
Now the charity is planning a new exhibition, "Angels and Demons: Does It Have To Be This Way?", which opens this month at Shoreditch Town Hall. The idea is to look at the preconceptions people commonly hold about different social groups. Who are the demons, and who are the angels? "We're playing a lot with this idea of appearance and disappearance," explains Kriton Papadopoulos, the artist leading the workshop. "It's about perception and reality, about that point when fear of the unknown changes into something else - into finding something that makes you feel yourself again."
The art on display will be created by more than 500 young people from London, drawn from the poorest and the wealthiest backgrounds. The film that the girls are making will play on a loop in the basement, but visitors will be free to clamber through all the rooms, each containing art or performances exploring the exhibition's title.
"I started thinking about it because I got so fed up of the children being demonised in the media," says Camila Batmanghelidjh, the charismatic founder and director of Kids Company, who was voted Person of the Year by New Statesman readers in 2006. "All the children we have here today have had pretty horrific experiences. Civil society perceives itself as angelic, and sees the kids as demons who attack this way of life. What civil society doesn't realise is that it's being demonic in some of the decisions it is making in relation to these children."
Batmanghelidjh explains that in one borough where Kids Company works, 7,165 referrals were made to child protection last year, of which 215 were taken. Because of funding shortages, social workers have to make terrible decisions. For example, they take children into care if they have experienced penetrative sexual abuse, but if it's not penetrative the children are left where they are. "That's why we wanted to do this exhibition," says Batmanghelidjh. "We wanted to bring our kids and public school kids together to show that the demonised kids aren't morally flawed - they just don't have the same starting points. Art is a short cut; it's a way of bridging two worlds."
Two worlds are meeting in the basement as she speaks, as teenagers who have grown up in care or on the street work on a canvas with Vita Hewison, 16, from the private St Paul's Girls' School. When the talk turns to getting a job, Vita says that, in her circle, it is common for young people to get work experience through their parents' contacts: "Then we work for free - but it's not like I need to work for money."
Sophie, 20, her cap pulled low over her face, explains that when you're on benefits, you are constantly pushed to get a job. "But when you try, there's none," she says, "so you sell junk or you drive people into prostitution." Jerome, 19, who has been quiet up to now, disagrees. "I've never struggled to get a job, but I've realised it's about the way I speak. Because I grew up in care around a lot of professionals, I can speak the way people expect." He and Darnell, who is also 19 and who also grew up in care, get grief from their peers. "They say we speak the Queen's English and they call us Bounties or coconuts - brown outside, white inside," says Darnell, laughing.
Vita is challenged to guess how much money the kids in care are given to live off each week. "About £200?" she ventures. The others fall about laughing. "Try £44.56." She is genuinely shocked. "You could ask anyone at my school that and they just wouldn't know. It's not that people aren't compassionate, but they need to be led into understanding this stuff. Because we just don't have any contact with it. And it's people like our parents who could get policy changed."
Annie, 22, who started to deal drugs after her mother and sister were shot, agrees. "We need to find a way to get her class mixing up with our side. But we need help, 'cos if we walk into her school dressed like this they'll call the cops! It'll be hard, but we can make a change."
On the canvas between them is a series of circles. They decide to take one each and draw something inside that represents their "inner worlds"; then they will draw outside the circles to join the worlds up. Vita picks one at the edge of the canvas, and carefully draws a girl, curled against the curve of her circle. What does it represent? "Guilt," she replies.
Camila Batmanghelidjh hopes that guilt won't be the public's only reaction to the exhibition. However, as she acknowledges: "The experiences are very challenging. There is a boy, for example, who was raped aged nine and ended up in the sex industry. He's going to use the toilet area of this house to show the interface between civil society and sexual abuse of young boys."
But there are more positive works planned, too. One room will be turned into a universal space of worship; in another, children will make bandannas of peace in contrast to those used by gangs. The artists helping with the project are under strict instructions only to facilitate the children's ideas, not to direct them.
"It's very different from an artist conceptualising an art piece," says Batmanghelidjh. "These kids create from an emotional space - like Darnell came up with the idea of doing his mother as a rolling pin, one side blood and the other side cupcakes. Because it has such integrity, the symbolisation of it is aesthetically extraordinary without the kids having had the training or ability. When you look at the visuals, something of your heart moves. Very little art nowadays does that."
"Angels and Demons: Does It Have To Be This Way?" opens at Shoreditch Town Hall, London EC1, on 21 June. Visit: http://www.kidsco.org.uk
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