From the original Festival website:

PAVES is the culmination of a year-long creative collaboration between five female artists working in the UK, Croatia, Israel, Northern Ireland and Kurdistan-Iraq.

The artists all share the experience of creating powerful and passionate performances within the context of recent war or conflict and have spent time together in each country responding to each other’s work and experiences and the very different environments within which they function.

Over the year, they have made and shown work in London, Zagreb, Staglinec, Belfast, Tel Aviv and Erbil and have negotiated visas, border crossings, absence and presence in time, space and alternative dimensions.  This performance installation, made especially for NRLA, seeks to bring together all the component parts of the year and to explore who we are, where we come from, responses to painful situations and what it means to be free in a non-negotiable world.

Anne Bean has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative projects worldwide in a range of media from light and sound to performance, sculpture and drawing. Born in Zambia she studied Fine Art at Cape Town and Reading universities and started making work in the early 1970s.

“Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world….. a “magnification” of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day or night, interiors, exteriors seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting but all attuned to unique situations.”  Guy Brett

PAVES has been commissioned by New Moves International for the NRLA and is supported by the British Council Creative Collaboration programme and Grants for the Arts through Arts Council England. 

Two additional films are added to the documentation above: Redress covers the decade of the conception, inception and trajectory of PAVES, from Anne Bean’s 365 Dresses in London 2004/5 to Poshya Kakl’s campaign on social media, asking people to donate their breath for  victims of ISIS, 2015; The Ballad of Paves is a montage comprising the formation and activities of the PAVES collective during 2008 to NRLA actions in 2010.

further contextual material added in 2020:

PAVES – watch the NRLA Panel discussion: Crossing Zones

PAVES – a conversation – the emails from 2008 to 2010
– read extracts from correspondence in the two years leading to the NRLA:  PAVES a conversation PDF

Helen Kaplinsky’s text for the Ballad of PAVES DVD

PAVES – project notes by Anne Bean from 2010  

PAVES was reviewed by Mary Brennan in the Herald in 2010.

annebean.net