Airtel Art in School Exhibition-Students bring Seychelles’ environment to hotel rooms |11 June 2005

This has been made possible through a joint project between telecommunications company Airtel and the International School as well as the National College of the Arts.

Since January students from the International School aged between 5 and 13 years old spent their weekends and holidays doing 350 paintings under the themes “Land” and “Sea”. This means that the students had to do paintings on the natural beauty and marine life of Seychelles on canvases ranging in size from 60 x 60 cm to 90 x 120cm. The canvases were sponsored by Airtel.

These paintings, which depict the lush green environment and vibrant colours of Seychelles, are now on display at the National Library.

While officially launching the exhibition on Wednesday afternoon, Airtel’s chief executive officer, Neeran Chhiber, explained that when the company purchased Le Meridien Barbarons Hotel, they wondered whether there might be opportunities for the school children to get involved with the transformation of the hotel.

Eventually Salim Currimjee, the architect of the hotel refurbishment, came up with the idea of encouraging school children to create unique and exciting art works for the hotel rooms.

As the canvas will be hung in hotel rooms, it is essential that the colours used are restful and not too vibrant, so the expertise of popular artists like Colbert Nourrice, Barbara Jenson and Heather Maund came very useful as they helped the students with ground rules of image making.

From there, students created their own images based on the given themes through colours, forms, motif and patterns.

According to Mr Chhiber the paintings will be installed in the hotel rooms at the end of this month, prior to the re-opening of the hotel. Even after they are placed in specific hotel rooms all guests in the hotel will be able the see all the works as they will be on CD Rom. There will also be a picture catalogue at the reception where guests will also be able to view all the paintings.

Due to a lack of space at the National Library, only 130 paintings are on display there. Members of the public who wish to view the rest of the paintings can do so at the International School.
CEO Chhiber said that the project was a way of getting school children to express themselves in an artistic way.

He also called on parents to encourage their children to develop their creativity.

Stating that Airtel has helped the school with a few projects in the past, Mr Chhiber said that soon the telecommunication company and the school will embark on a new project to set up a digital library multi-media.

For his part the headteacher of the school, Martin Kennedy, had words of thanks for the parents for supporting their children and the three artists who helped with the projects.

Present at the opening ceremony were the students, their parents as well as Airtel staff.

It is to note that Chantale Barallon from the International School and Daniel Dodin from the National College of the Arts made 10 paintings each.

Members of the public have until Wednesday, June 15 to view the exhibition.