Join Us for Our International Women’s Day Fundraiser – 27th March
Come and join us in person again! In honour of International Women’s Day we’ll be presenting a selection of short films & an exhibition at Colet House.
Join us for a night of celebration honouring the incredible women we have had the privilege of working with in Western Sahara and Armenia. The evening will feature an exhibition of photographs of and from both communities and a screening of a couple of short films celebrating Sahrawi Women and children.
For more than 12 years, we have worked alongside the Saharawi refugee community in Southwest Algeria and survivors of domestic violence at the Women’s Support Centre (WSC) in Yerevan, Armenia. We look forward to sharing more about these extraordinary communities and their resilience through creativity.
Each £15 ticket includes a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink.
2025 Call out to Exhibition Organisers, Human Rights Events, and Refugee Events across the UK. If you are interested in learning more about the Saharawi Community, already know about them and want to organise an event to raise awareness about their plight then please get in contact. We have several photography exhibitions showcasing Saharawi Photographers’ work that are ready to travel and be shared… get in contact here.
Over 2024 we collaborated with many Amnesty International Branches across the UK and exhibited ’Sand & Vision’ a photography project led by Emma Brown at Olive Branch Arts. Over 2017, 2018 & 2024 we worked alongside new and emerging artists on the Saharawi Refugee Camps to create work that shares their voice and story. Please check out the video below to get a flavour of the project and the exhibitions.
In 2025, we will return and be running teacher training programmes on the camps so the Olive Branch-trained photographers can run Photo Voice workshops and gain employment as part of Desert Voicebox, a Sandblast Arts after-school project run by local Saharawi teachers.
Olive Branch Arts work creatively with displaced communities here in the UK and abroad, we are committed to building relationships across communities to promote love, dignity, and care for all people who seek refuge. We are committed to sharing our participant’s stories around the world to enable them to be seen and heard by a new audience. To this end we will be launching the resulting exhibition of the participants work from Armenia on International Women’s Day 2020 in London before it tours several cities worldwide.
By offering participants a safe place to come together and learn new skills we aim to develop bonds and confidence across this community of women and their supporters, enabling them to visually document their own stories. By focusing on the moments of freedom they cherish the ultimate idea of this work is to reduce the isolation of this community through the sharing of photography.
The Freedom Photography Project came about due to a question from Tumana, one of the participants during our Photography training on the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in 2017, she asked “How do you photograph Freedom?” The impact of that question and our exploration of it the following year on the camps gave birth to an idea that has since found us working with the charity Play for Progress and their unaccompanied young refugees in London and now with the WSC, a domestic violence charity in Armenia.
Here at Olive Branch, we believe in the transformative power of storytelling.
If you would like to support our work here are a number of ways, you can subscribe to our newsletter, donate to our Sahrawi Project, get involved in the Freedom Project, visit our shop, invite our Sahrawi Exhibition & Talk into your place of work/community or follow us on Twitter & Facebook.
We offer a broad range of therapeutic arts-based experiences and training programmes designed to engage, challenge and support people of all ages and backgrounds, and look to create work of artistic excellence for, with and by the community.
Through the exploration of multi-art forms, we aim to empower participants to find their voice, promoting social change and a deeper understanding of ourselves, and the world around us.
…passionate about people
and the arts…
