Despite closed borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Red Pencil continued its overseas humanitarian mission work by leveraging on technology to reach its various beneficiaries.

Singaporeans Yen Chua and Nicole Yeo served as lead art therapist and assistant art therapist with educators in Bangalore, Jammu and Kashmir in India to run several intensive, multi-week, online training programmes.

In this presentation, they will be sharing their preparation for the programme as well as learning points working cross-culturally over a virtual platform.

This presentation is based on the art therapy interventions carried out as part of the Red Cross psychological care service with asylum seekers and displaced people in reception centres in Malaga, Spain. The main objective was to offer participants a space to enhance individual and collective resilience for coping with migratory grief and the process of adaptation and integration in the host country.

About the speaker

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the arts and cultural sector globally has sought a multitude of ways to survive crisis while issues of precarity, ecological impacts, access to culture and arts, the role of technology, physical and mental well-being, identity politics, and the re-engineering of cityscapes for a post-pandemic world, have emerged as pressing issues for practitioners as well as policymakers and researchers.

How are the stories from the inside different from what is seen from the outside? Is it possible to see the hidden layers of our conflict? 

In this storytelling performance, writer and director Ahmed Saleh will integrate his artistic responses as chapters of his lived experiences in Palestine.

House (4 min)
For generations, a family lived in a spacious, beautiful and generous house. The generosity of the house had become part of their life. Guests were always welcome to enjoy a pleasant stay. Until one guest arrived with a different plan in mind.

It can be difficult to cultivate and sustain our individual and collective well-being in today’s world. We might find ourselves more readily experiencing burnout. 

In this lecture, MA Art Therapy Artist in Residence Prof Susan D. Imus will examine the concepts of well-being, wellness, joyfulness, self-care, and community care through a cultural context. What communities do you belong to and how are they affected by and with your self-care?

Touching Moments #4 - Art Therapy is a community open art studio event at LASALLE that celebrates 'Touch' – the theme of this year's Enabling Festival.

Dr Jordan S. Potash will present an evening lecture to the LASALLE and mental health communities as well as the general public as part of the visiting artist series by LASALLE’s MA Art Therapy programme.
 

A Good Death follows Dr Leong, a palliative care doctor, as she journeys with her patients through their final days. As they open up to her about their hopes and fears, her own family begins to argue over what is best for her ageing father.

Faced with an increasingly blurred line between her professional and personal life, Dr Leong finds herself asking: What truly makes life worth living? What is a good and dignified death? And on whose terms? 

Some artists resist being called part of the 'creative industries'. There are many reasons for this, one of which is the artist's reluctance to speak about commercial returns in relation to their art. So does the artist play a key part in the creative economy?