The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School

Participants: Material Library, Mockcamp, Birdcall, Kuroda, Curating School Seoul, Happy Class, PIE, and YPC × Rat Journal.

Participants in the exhibition The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School [1] include artist-led groups, collectives, studios, art spaces, and schools that independently organize their curricula, gatherings, and workshops. [2] The exhibition examines the motivations and approaches of self-organizing individuals who pursue creative endeavors and are connected by common interests.[4] It also explores their modes of learning, including collaboration, knowledge sharing, and peer formation. Rather than functioning as a final product, the exhibition seeks to raise questions that lead to creative processes and collegial relationships. It aims to be a site where these processes unfold.[3] It features diverse programs, including small-group gatherings where artists, colleagues, and audiences can meet. These programs reveal successive phases of practice, experimentation, and research.[5] All these activities is created through the mediums of dialogue, shared laughter, ongoing encouragement, and mutual support exchanged among colleagues at the table.[6]

*Please see the footnotes below the wiki.

The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School Wiki
[1] The word “school” in The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School departs from its conventional meaning as an institutional or formal site of education. It is redefined here to refer to the connections and relationships formed by artists and collectives who autonomously sustain their practices at the margins of the system.

[2] Eight groups, comprising forty-two individuals, are participating in the School at ARKO Art Center. They operate under various designations, such as artist-led group, collective, studio, art space, and school, while organizing themselves as independent institutions and systems. They independently design workshops, lectures, and meetings and cultivate learning through knowledge sharing and collective study. Instead of speaking the language of exhibition, these activities give rise to networks of relationships: people and environments.

[3] Colleagues in the art world function as schools for one another. They share common interests and provide the support necessary to persist through creative struggles. While organizing the process of learning collectively, each participant assumes practical roles while contributing to and shaping these processes. New pathways to knowledge emerge through peer reviews and discussion.

[4] Self-organization can be understood as both a way of life and a strategic choice for creative practitioners working in an era of uncertainty. At a time when educational systems and state structures often fall short, it represents an effort to invent alternatives and create autonomous spaces.

[5] ARKO Art Center temporarily operates the School, a composite entity. This provisional framework fosters processes of practice, failure, and learning. Simultaneously, it reveals the structural conditions of the art world, the interconnections among practitioners, and the organization of the ecosystem both within and beyond institutional systems.

[6] What, then, should this School be? It should be emotional bonds built upon shared interests; an expansion of knowledge through openness and sharing; and affectionate observations among teachers, colleagues, and senior and junior practitioners in the field.