Flying Embers: An Indo-German collab displayed in Hyderabad takes up women’s cause with art and poetry

By Katharina Holstein-Sturm
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Katharina Holstein-Sturm, a visual artist from Germany and Hyderabad-based activist-poet Jameela Nishat are from two different cultural backgrounds. What binds the duo is a dream to better the position of women through their artforms.

Katharina Holstein-Sturm and Jameela Nishat
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Flying Embers, their creative collaboration currently on view at Hyderabad’s Goethe Zentrum portrays reality. On display is the Artist’s Book with Katharina’s drawings and Jameela’s Hindi/Urdu poems. translated into English. Combining art and poetry, they address conflict, female foeticide, abuse, exploitation and forceful marriage of young girls. The mixed media exhibits comprising paper, fabric, cement and wire, have added embellishments in the form of calligraphy art by Mohammed Irfan.

calligraphy artist Mohammed Irfan
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

For Irfan, a signboard artist who paints banners, doing calligraphy with a pen on a work of art is a unique experience. “It is an expression of art; the work looks easy but takes time,” he says. One of the challenges he faced, while using ink, was to ensure the beauty of strokes and that letters retain the textures. He shares, ““I learnt to read and write Urdu after I became a commercial artist to experience and understand the beauty of the language.”

How it started

This Indo-German project started at a video meeting of artists and poets from India and Germany in April 2022. The virtual interaction brought them all on “a platform to stand for peace, humanity and sustainability,” says Jameela, who sent a few poems to Katharina. Inspired to create a few works, the German artist then came to Hyderabad — her first visit to India — in January 2023.

Katharina informs through an email from Hamburg that the works were created at the guest house of the University of Hyderabad where she stayed for 19 days. While here she also conducted a workshop on Artists’ Books for first-year art students at the university. “I was well received, had great fun and the workshop culminated in an exhibition at the Department of Fine Arts,” she says. Katharina, who studied visual communication and graphic design at FH Würzburg, and is a member of various artist group and galleries in Germany.

By Katharina Holstein-Sturm
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

With numerous exhibitions in Germany, Europe and the US, Katharina says poetry has to move her to translate it into art. “It was easy with these poems; they were so powerful and visual,” she adds. She works mostly with ink and paper. While she draws on all kinds of paper — even on old book pages — she uses thin, coloured tissue or wrapping paper to create layers. “Chance is a large element of my creative process which I embrace and incorporate. These Artists’ Books consist of many drawings that I combine and collage on top of each other,” she explains her creative process.

She has bought small pieces of festive fabric in Hyderabad and displayed them in contrast to the content of the books. Katharina says, “Every part of those books has a meaning. The cover of “Give me my milk, mother’ is a traditional wedding fabric. The broken cement pieces I have sewn into a fabric used for young girls party dresses to quote the line ‘all my veins were filled with concrete”.

Founder of Shaheen Resource Centre for Women in Hyderabad, Jameela has published three collections of poetry and her work has been translated and featured in several notable anthologies, including Women Writing in India and In Their Own Voice. One of Jameela’s poems ‘ Mujhe doodh pilaa de maa, mujhe Kok me mat maar ( Give me my milk mother, Do not kill me in your womb), dedicated to her mother, “is not a personal poem but has a political message in it,” says Jameela.

By Katharina Holstein-Sturm
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

As a woman who has ‘lived through and processed pain,’ Katharina tapped into that well to create images for this book. She says, “Yes it was painful but also liberating to find an artistic outlet for feelings like these. The translation of this poem into art worked well. We had some touching experiences when we showed it at the recent Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF); looking at the book, some women started crying softly.”

Since Jameela and Katharina hail from different cultural backgrounds, was it easy to find a common ground in the cause to better the position of women? Katharina replies, “Since that fight sadly is international, it was easy to find a common ground. Jameela and I are both feminists and fighters. I wrote in our proposal for the HLF: we fight with poetry and art to change the world.”

Flying Embers is on at Goethe Zentrum in Hyderabad till March 6.