This year’s edition of the A.R.M Holding Children’s Programme features Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren who will be encouraging children to creatively and abstractly think about their environments. Using everyday craft materials and scrap fabrics, the children will be imagining and collaging together designs that will later be sewn and transformed into flags. An extension of his ongoing project Signs of Abstraction, the workshop acts as an invitation to engage abstractly with the context we inhabit, allowing the children to work together towards a common goal and create collaborative artworks: colourful tapestries and flags.
“In The Flag Project, abstraction is wrenched from the comfort of the canvas and taken out into the world. The project shows that everyone, regardless of background and prior knowledge, has the ability to create great art in a creative context.”
Following its successful launch at Art Dubai in March 2023, which saw over 260 students take part in 17 workshops, the programme is due to expand to 90 schools across the 7 Emirates and reach over 8,000 students over 6 weeks; considerably expanding in its scale from the previous edition which engaged over 5,500 students. This year’s theme, abstraction, will allow children to let their imagination run wild with everyday materials available around them.
A.R.M. Holding is a private investment firm and a multi-focused economic enabler investing in partnerships that reinforce Dubai’s position as the global capital of culture and innovation. It collaborates to that end with Art Dubai on a number of initiatives that foster young talent and creativity in the emirate.