The Ignorant Art School

Focusing on archival material, artists and educators represented in the ongoing five-phase exhibition and event programme of The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation initiated and curated by Hao since 2021, the presentation will reference three case studies; the Hornsey College of Art Sit-in of 1968, the White Room project initiated by Rita Donagh at Reading University in 1970 and Gudskul, an alternative art education platform in Jakarta, to explore non-hierarchical models of alternative pedagogy which understands the creation and dissemination of knowledge as an inherently social and thus collaborative process.
Asserting the curatorial as a mode of critical inquiry that transforms the exhibition space into a laboratory for activating collaborative and/or collective agency, the talk will delineate The Ignorant Art School as an ‘event/moment of knowledge’ outside the institution in which hegemonic inequalities of access and power can be unlearned.