Knowledge politics, transgressive pedagogies, and political imagination in contemporary art and education

A symposium as part of Undisciplinary Learning. Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance: KNOWLEDGES

With the Feminist health care research group Berlin, Claudia Firth, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Rajkamal Kahlon, Ferdiansyah Thajib / Kunci Cultural Studies Center, and Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor

What could an aesthetic education of the present be? Which forms of un_learning does the art of the 21st century suggest? How do we live and create knowledge? Where do we find it? Whose knowledge, whose aesthetics, whose present, whose we?

The day-long symposium on 13 November concludes the program section Undisciplinary Learning: KNOWLEDGES, which focuses on self-empowering pedagogies, especially from feminist, queer, leftist, anti-racist, and decolonial contexts and renegotiates institutional epicenters of western education and science such as schools, research institutions, or museums.

PROGRAM
Doors and exhibition open from 13 h
Child care available 13.30 – 19.30 h*
All formats in English

14 h
“SCHULINSEL SCHARFENBERG” Sorry but here it’s a mess… Empowerment.
Welcome and introductions by Janine Halka, Suza Husse, Julia Lazarus, Frederik Luszeit and Eva Storms

14.30 – 16 h
Collective readings in knowledge politics, transgressive pedagogies, and political imagination
Critical walks through the exhibition Undisciplinary Learning. Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance: SPACE in three groups with the readers Claudia Firth, Stine Marie Jacobsen and Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor

16.30 – 18.30 h
Outside in the Teaching Machine: Exercises and conversations in three groups with
Feminist health care group Berlin**, Rajkamal Kahlon and Ferdiansyah Thajib / Kunci Cultural Studies Center

18.30 – 19.30 h
Outside in the Teaching Machine: Closing discussion with the participants and all people of the day

*We can offer childcare for those who would like to attend with children. If you do, please let us know by Friday 11th of November by emailing kfs@district-berlin.com.
** For the exercises with the Feminist health care group Berlin please bring a yoga mat and/or a blanket if you can.

With a desire to re-think and co-investigate the “school” “teaching machine,” based on an understanding of education as a mode of political imagination and a field of experimentation, the symposium initiates a platform for approaches that might be understood within the context of the so-called “educational turn” (Irit Rogoff) in contemporary art, in which an urgent need for freedom in education, for new forms of collectivism and for alternative learning structures has found its expression. Gathering artists, activists, theorists, and educators to exchange strategies, processes, and methods of anti-hegemonic knowledge transfer and empowerment in art and education, the symposium unfolds in three experimental settings placed within the exhibition at District:

Collective readings in knowledge politics, transgressive pedagogies, and political imagination

The collective readings open a space for conversation based on the specific artistic and activist educational practices embodied and investigated by Claudia Firth, Stine Marie Jacobsen, and Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor. The three readers will introduce their practice and research in relation to specific works in the exhibition Undisciplinary Learning. Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance: SPACE and thus facilitate reflection, connection and critique on the herein presented aesthetics and languages, in which contemporary relations of emancipatory pedagogy, artistic practice, and political resistance can be experienced and reflected.

Outside in the Teaching Machine: Exercises and conversations

Named after the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s book of the same title, the exercises and conversations in the format Outside in the Teaching Machine introduce alternative methodologies of knowledge production within and beyond artistic practices. Together with the Feminist health care research group Berlin, Rajkamal Kahlon, and Ferdiansyah Thajib / Kunci Cultural Studies Center the responsibility / ability to respond within learning and teaching is explored as a form of co-investigation in relation to the politics of the body and care, to history and solidarity, and to sustainability and togetherness as modes of emancipatory co-education.

Undisciplinary Learning is an art project manifesting in an interdisciplinary program of exhibitions, workshops, performances, and urban interventions that takes Peter Weiss’ novel. The Aesthetics of Resistance as an impetus to question the current politics of knowledge at the intersection of artistic, political, and pedagogical practices. Adopting an intersectional perspective on its historical expansion, its urban resonances in Berlin, and current fields of insurgency, Undisciplinary Learning suggests expanded readings and critical relocations of The Aesthetics of Resistance.

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