Learning through Arts, Narrative, and Discourse
Kriti believes in being thoughtful about the small things so that they can lead to big impact. She is a seasoned curator and arts educator who has a knack for bringing together experts with different backgrounds to create something new. For this issue, we conduct an interview with her to understand her approach and methodology to arts education. Through anecdotes and examples, Kriti walks us through her evocative process.
We hope this piece will inspire our readers to relook at their environments as spaces of learning. A lot of what Kriti does is by making connections with people and their ideas. We hope our readers will be able to make similar connections within their communities.
Can you tell us a little bit about LAND? What does LAND do?
LAND (Learning through Arts, Narrative and Discourse) is a pedagogical research lab dedicated to formulating arts as the reimagined language of learning through transdisciplinary interventions in education and art curation. We work towards cultivating creativity by designing alternative, process-oriented art projects through an action-research methodology, while engaging with individuals, institutions, and communities that support learning across different visual mediums and disciplines.
LAND aims to actualize a learning environment that thrives on garnering inquisitiveness and curiosity amongst learners, where research-based art learning modules led by designers, artists, environmentalists, writers/poets, musicians, and art educators are integrated into curriculums in collaboration with various institutions. We are dedicated to developing a ‘culture of seeing’ that engages sensitively and critically with visuals that enrich our everyday lives. Therefore, our objective is to become an indispensable part of the fabric of everyday learning and curate a rich bank of resources for collaborative change-making. We work in two ways: through our curated exhibitions and our education projects. Our pedagogy has been derived from practical implementations and experiments.
What was the impetus to start LAND? What were the gaps that you were hoping to address?
Instead of seeing gaps, I looked at possibilities. Before I initiated LAND, I worked as a curator, heading an art collection for a leading institution dealing with contemporary art1 in the subcontinent. I soon realized that each artwork can become a great navigating point to understand so many disciplines. That’s when my team and I decided to bring in an element of education to this as an institution.
I also felt that education and art have drifted apart.The inquiry points of learning and arts are very similar, but because there is a lot of difference between what goes on inside a classroom and an art institute, there are cracks and fractures that one can work with. So, LAND was established to enable some sort of a symbiotic ecosystem, where learning with a transdisciplinary methodology2 can become possible; where we don’t look at an artwork only for its skill, but also the concepts, thoughts, and aesthetics3, and see it as a way to evoke different languages, nuances, and dialogue within learning systems.
Can you talk a little more about this gap between the contemporary art scene and the classroom? Can you share some examples?
Within the Indian context, when you look at the history of art, you will find that art was there in every aspect of learning. We look at it, appreciate it, and study it from different disciplines and mediums. And so, I’m not going to decipher here, this is visual arts, this is theatre, this is music, this is that, let’s just look at it as a collective ecosystem of arts. So, when we are looking at miniature paintings4 we are looking at ragamalas5, but there is also music, thought, science, geography, and ecology, there’s an ecosystem, which comes together through the artwork. This kind of learning already existed in India.
Now, when we look at our classrooms, art is often viewed as a skill-based activity. It has become an activity that is extracurricular. But, skills cannot be the only definition of art. Within that one object that the artist is creating, you can see multiple disciplines coming together. This is true for kinetic sculptures or art made using mixed media. But as an audience, I don’t think we have that way of ‘seeing’ anymore. We only look at whether an artwork is beautiful or not. A child is good at art or not. But art, I feel, is truly about inquiry. It is about a community. And a community is not developed if there’s no communing in it. This is some sort of an underlying spirit with which art can be developed and in its true nature it will always be at the core of learning. As long as art is on the periphery, it’s not really art. It is some activity that is happening and you have called it art, because that’s the definition that you feel is relevant for you within a system.
LAND has done a lot of work with non-metro schools and with communities that are diverse. Can you tell us how and why you made that choice?
It actually came about with an element of challenge for me. I have worked with spaces, organizations, where art education is very mass. A lesson plan is made and it could be sent to Delhi, Punjab, Hyderabad, anywhere. It really, really gets to me or provokes me to see a child copying, for instance, Picasso’s work, say cubes6 or starry night7, and that’s a way to tick the creativity box. If creativity has to be enabled, it has to be done in clusters, and in very thoughtful clusters, it cannot be mass produced. It is a very human ability, which you try to enhance. For that human ability, you have to have thoughtful conversations, clusters, and not only understand the school or the learner, but the ecosystem, where the learner is from.
For instance, when we went to Jodhpur for LAND’s fellowship program8 with Public Arts Trust of India, we had decided we will only work with five schools, 25 learners per school. We hadn’t decided whether they would all be from the same age group or not. The context was important. Whoever understands Jodhpur will know about the low water levels, the step wells, the architecture, the documented history – there are a lot of contexts that go into the making of a school and education. We researched about all the five schools for five months before we arrived in Jodhpur. We studied history, the environment, politics, and the way in which the community lives. We found that Hatai9 is something very important in Jodhpur, where everybody comes together to have a conversation about everything in life, including folklores and folk history. Documented history is by somebody else, but folk history will always be the narratives of a community in their own voice.
What was important for us was to create a system before we enter schools, where we understand them, understand every little context about the learner, about the systems, about the politics, religion, philosophies, and then have the learner take the lead – What is it that you want to research/inquire about? And can we actually create an environment where the learner is nudged to be curious, creative, or just wonder through the modules that we want to create with them?
At the end of it all, it is only about the learner, which we all actually are. So, we need to redefine our roles as educators.
Thirty years ago, a teacher would be giving out all the information, because there was no Google or internet. But that is not the case anymore. Children may not have art classes or exposure to complex technology, but most families have at least one phone with an internet connection, and I see kids learning many things through this device including languages with Duolingo10. So, can we use the child’s existing knowledge and build on it? This is what educators now have to ask.
This is why I choose the grassroot level, because if we can show some proof, to the stakeholders, with the clusters, and a new way of thinking and learning, then we can create a change, a shift, a little placement from here to there, because learning is a generational game.
Where does LAND draw its methodology from? How would you explain it?
It’s not just the role of an artist to teach art, there are multiple individuals who can teach or bring learning through art. When I am working with educators for a project like Thinker’s Garden11, where many educators from different parts of the country come, Ihave been able to research and engage with different pedagogies, the praxis, and practical implications of what can be.
Our methodology has three simple elements. There has to be wonder. That’s why not giving a lesson plan becomes very important. When you wonder, you think of themes and ideas that provoke you as an individual. For instance, if we go to a park, you can wonder about an insect, someone else can wonder about the pattern of a leaf, a third person can wonder about the soil, it’s a very individual response. From that we move towards research. From research, emerges an element of action or some sort of tangibility to the process that you want to bring together.
It is wonder, research, and action, and is based primarily on the Pedagogy of Hopeby Paulo Freire, where he very thoughtfully speaks about the learning process. He says a painting is not just a painting, or a sculpture is not just a sculpture – it is wrapped in the processes of your own unique being. Just like that, even research is not just research, it is wrapped by so many elements of you and that’s when an artefact comes out of it. So, if we can formulate an element where the process itself is as important as a tangible product and there is freedom to the process, then the tangibility of whatever is the result that you’re wishing for will come through.
Growing up in a very cognitive system of exam taking, I never thought I was creative. I had a lot of creative provocations from around my system, but I never thought I was creative. Every time I wanted to go a bit off the line using my imagination, I realized it wouldn’t be possible to do so within the system. Wonder is fundamental to humans; we work on the possibility of inquiry and curiosity. It is through that that imagination is formed, through imagination we ignite creativity, or an element of a tangible element of creativity. At the heart of it, LAND wants to bring in creative discourses and narratives within systems.
We also want to think about the definition of arts. A lot of practicing artists have redefined it in many, many ways. You have artists like Ravi Agarwal12, who is an environmentalist, an educator, an artist. When he went to the Yamuna and was inquiring about the flowers, wondering about their journey, a creative thought emerged, and from that he made a photo diary. But it’s much more than just a photo diary, it’s about his research, inquiry, thoughts, and creativity coming together. What is important here is that Ravi Agarwal actually had the possibilities of inquiry and wonder. And from that, he decided to make a photo book. The photo book is not the important thing here. He could have taken just the one photo of a flower and the inquiry would still have been there. He could also have made a sketch or written an essay. So, tangibility should not be the defining factor here.
That’s why LAND really likes to follow this methodology; there is an ecology of communication that comes through, which is truly symbiotic. Learning cannot be transactional, it is full of gaps, full of failures, full of unfolding processes. If we actually let this be, that’s where the seed of thoughts, of creativity come to life. And then there are possibilities.
Can you tell us a little more about the ecology of communication and the symbiotic nature of learning? And who the different stakeholders are?
When we say symbiotic or we speak about the ecology of communication, it depends on who is in that space at that given moment. If it is a classroom with three learners and one educator, then it is about them four. Their experiences and thoughts are going to bring about the communication. Now within that, you bring in one practicing artist, the ecology of communication changes straightaway. You take away the educator and leave the artist, it changes again.
It is a playful manner in which we need to see the individuality of a learning process manifest. The other element I’ve spoken about is the hierarchy of learning. True learning happens when an educator and learner come together. It cannot be me telling you something only because I have a few more years of experience in life.
The question then becomes – can we really come to that platform of oneness within this space, where we all are inquiring together? One example would be this game we worked on in Jodhpur, which we call ‘Khel Khel Mein’. The inquiry area was on ecology. The sub elements were museums and folklores.
So, there is an educator and 25 learners in the classroom. They started thinking about what ecology means. One group decided to learn about it from books, another decided to go to Rao Jodha Park, which is a desert park in Jodhpur. There, a naturalist was invited into the conversation. He made the group observe different plants. When they started looking at the plants, they started seeing how certain plants conserve water to survive. One learner suddenly said, “If we take inspiration from these plants and apply it to the way we construct our buildings, we can conserve a lot more water, and make a positive contribution to the future.” So we invited a biomimicry13 expert to help interested learners pursue this thought further. Then we invited two other artists who were also working with the environment and the conversation became a larger research system with all of them together. As a group, they came together to create this game called ‘Khel Khel Mein’. So an ecology of communication is created when different thoughts, in a very non-hierarchical manner, come in and there’s a movement of thoughts, narratives, and discourses.
This question is about the transdisciplinary nature within which LAND operates. Have you had any experiences when the very idea of art, with which you work, has been challenged or contested? And how have you responded to these contestations?
There is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary, and these are different methodologies14. When we think about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, then one discipline becomes some sort of scaffolding for the other discipline. But when you look at a trans contextual way of learning, it is not as much about the disciplines or the mediums, it is about the thought that forms the crux of it.
So when we are speaking about science, geography, and art, we’re not really speaking about three disciplines, we are speaking about one thought, which can be inquired by merging points from here and there. This can be confusing to understand. That’s the difference between praxis15 and a theoretical way of being. So what really happens in a trans contextual way of learning is that it is led by an inquiry and a thought process, as much as it is about disciplines.
Let me explain with an example, there is an artist called Sushanta Mandal16 and he works with kinetic sculptures. One way of looking at his work is that art is enabling science, because you can see movement, you can see different machine parts coming together, and art is enabling in that he draws all these things and brings them together. And then there is a kinetic sculpture, which has come to a flow, but when Sushanta was actually making it, he was inquiring about the fragility of life. That’s the thought he wanted to work with and he brought science, aesthetics, and art together to inquire about that one element in some way or other, and so it becomes very trans contextual.
Let me give you one more example. We were speaking about a mural about the prophet and the poet and one way of looking at it was that it is a humongous mural where skill is the point of focus and we’re placing two important figures together and that’s going to bring in a visual impact. The other was that we went into the discourses and depth and poetry and even thought about the colour and every little element of it. From literature, to history, to politics, to a dialogue coming together, they were thoughts, in-depth thoughts of inquiry. So when you look into that, that is trans contextual straightaway.
As long as there is hierarchy in disciplines, hierarchy in mediums, hierarchy in systems, it will be difficult to understand trans contextuality. Even with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, the role of art will just be that of a scaffolder for other disciplines, and that needs to break down. There are lots of nuances in contemporary art and people should know this is happening around us all the time.
What are the shifts you are hoping to make in the education ecosystem? What is the scale of these shifts and how can we act on these hopes?
Paulo Freire spoke about the banking system in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed17, about how in the education system that we are in, we want to provide some sort of a nurturing ground, but we only end up providing information. And then it is the information that comes out. But there is no knowledge and wisdom. If you’re going to take that away from the systems, it is going to be oppression of thought. As long as there’s oppression of thought, learning cannot be nurturing.
One thing I feel strongly about is that there should not be a very systematic timetable. Not just for the learner, but for the educator as well. Educators should have the right to create their own timetable within a classroom, where they have enough time for things like pauses, where they could just be inquiring three points together, where maybe three educators from different disciplines come together and make an ecology of communication.
It is a 40 minute class and you have to go from concept, to reflection, to Q&A, and then the class is over. A child who is learning about the wonders of a valley has to get out of it without any pause and go into trigonometry. It is difficult as a learner to enter such spaces.
We need to rethink one of the biggest problems in India. It’s not like kids are not educated, but they’re still not entering the workforce. Why? One of the major reasons for this is lack of cognitive empathy, collaboration, and inquiry.
If you ask organizations or companies what it is that they look for in people entering their workforce, you will hear them say that they want people who can re-think, re-invent, and re-look. Everybody wants people who are in touch with their creativity, with their own pauses, and their own ways of nurturing the possibilities of an inquiry. Within the current system, you cannot make that happen.
It’s really difficult because there are board exams and there’s no running away from the reality of things. I recently heard about a couple of micro schools in Bengaluru and how even these schools have to conduct exams because board exams have to happen. But the learners here can choose when and how many times they take an exam. And this gives some kind of freedom, where you only arrive at an exam as a process of sharing your inquiry instead of being fearful about it.
So, some sort of cluster formation within a classroom, possibilities of shifting certain elements within the timetable, rubrics around that could be a possibility.
Who are the varied stakeholders for your projects? How do you map this range of stakeholders? And what is the advocacy that you do?
There are few primary stakeholders for LAND and then we branch out from there. One of the main stakeholders will always be an art institution or a collection around which we can work. So the collection, museum, or a collector becomes very important. The other, of course, is an educational institution (where we think about the crux with the learner, educator, family, community, and school systems).
When we’re wondering which creative practitioner to invite for a particular project, whether it should be an artist, a naturalist, a biomimicry expert or anybody else, what really helps us decide is where we want to go with the project, and how this particular stakeholder can help us fulfil that vision.
In Jodhpur, there was this one instance when we wanted somebody who could help us raise thought-provoking questions, and we didn’t want to go through the entire journey of an artist or work with their entire collection. So, we reached out to Shilpa Gupta18 and we decided that with only three artworks we will create a session for the fellows (who were facilitating the project in Jodhpur). From there, we wanted to deep dive into wonder, and we began to think about who could be the best possible person. We needed an educator who could think about imagination. So I reached out to the School of Imagination in London and the Professor of Imagination there. I introduced her to the fellowship, the stage we were at, and the session I hoped we could do with her. Then the third element of it was to think about research and I really wanted to do that with a contemporary artist. I had been looking at Rana Begum’s19 work for a very long time and I reached out to Rana and asked her how she researched about colours.
Because one has worked with a lot of people in different capacities – as a curator, educator, researcher, focused on learning – it builds relationships. If somebody can see that you are making their collection grow as a thought process, if somebody can see that as an artist you’re helping them bridge the gap between the learner and them, then it shows you care. So I think it’s about that.
As per LAND’s vision of a certain foreseeable future, a better future, what would your request or appeal to the teaching community in schools be?
The first thing to keep in mind in every aspect of learning, whether it is just a lesson, or a project, or a term, or a school, district, whatever it is, is to look at the scale as depth. And that means you keep coming back to things. It doesn’t mean that you just touch the surface and let it be. So, looking into scale as depth in learning systems is important.
And the second thing that I would like to say is that it comes down to the ‘ways of seeing’ eventually. There is a difference between looking and seeing. Every time you approach something creative or the arts as a larger discourse, do not just look at it. See it, feel it, breathe it, be with it. I think only then any discourse with the arts can come through. Because if you’re just looking at it, then it is a very surface-based exchange, which is very transactional in nature with the discipline.
And the last thing I want to say is that when the early cavemen and women looked at the stars, they looked at the sky actually, and they said, “What is that?” That was a wonder question. And so much of civilization has come about because of these wonder questions. If we wouldn’t have wondered, fire wouldn’t have come out from stones. So, I think keeping the possibility of wonder alive in a classroom is very, very important.
1In its most basic sense, the umbrella term ‘contemporary art’ refers to art – namely, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance, and video art – produced today. Though seemingly simple, the details surrounding this definition are often a bit fuzzy, as different individuals’ interpretations of “today” may widely and wildly vary. Therefore, the exact starting point of the genre is still debated; however, many art historians consider the late 1960s or early 1970s (the end of modern art, or modernism) to be an adequate estimate. (https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-contemporary-art-definition/)
2Transdisciplinary learning is the exploration of a relevant concept, issue, or problem that integrates the perspectives of multiple disciplines in order to connect new knowledge and deeper understanding to real life experiences. (https://www.inspiringinquiry.com/learningteaching/transdisciplinary)
3A branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic)
4Indian miniatures are small-scale, highly detailed paintings. They trace back to at least 9th century CE, and are a living tradition with many contemporary artists still pursuing the art form. (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/6-things-to-know-about-indian-miniatures/MwXBsgeth_flpQ?hl=en)
5Ragamala painting is called a ragachitra in Indian vernacular. Medieval miniatures combined colour and music to produce paintings and most school of miniature paintings have produced ragachitra. (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/colour-meets-sound-salar-jung-museum/RgWhxceV3nugJA?hl=en)
6Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented around 1907-08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism)
7The Starry Night, a moderately abstract landscape painting (1889) of an expressive night sky over a small hillside village, one of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s most celebrated works. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Starry-Night)
8The Creative Arts Education Program was established by LAND in collaboration with the Public Arts Trust of India (PATI), engaging with educators in the Government schools of Jodhpur. This initiative introduced an arts-based curriculum that emphasizes the wellbeing and interests of learners, educators, and their communities.
9Village common place, chaupal. (https://hattai.page.tl/marwari-dictionary.htm)
10Duolingo is an application for learning languages through quick, bite sized lessons.
11Thinkers’ Garden is a space for educators to focus on their own learning and collaborative work. The inspiration behind the project is the idea of tending and nurturing that a Garden requires for its longevity and wellbeing. The mind of an educator is that Garden. We look at educators as thinkers who are creating living curriculums through their independent pedagogical practices, where they bring novelty and rediscovery with every concept that they teach. This program aims to bring these practices together and revisit them in a shared space with one another.
12Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer, curator. (https://www.raviagarwal.com/)
13Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by living organisms to solve challenges comparable to the ones we face as individuals and societies. (https://biomimicry.org/inspiration/what-is-biomimicry/)
15The process of using a theory or something that you have learned in a practical way. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/praxis)
16Susanta Mandal is a visual artist based in Delhi NCR. Born in Kolkata, he originally trained as a painter, but since then branched out into more conceptual installation-based work. His highly imaginative and innovative works have been exhibited widely in India and abroad. (https://www.artamour.in/post/susanta-mandal-art-of-the-movement)
17Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the foundational texts in the field of critical pedagogy, which attempts to help students question and challenge domination. (https://www.amazon.in/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Donaldo-P-Macedo/dp/0826412769)
18Shilpa Gupta (b.1976) lives and works in Mumbai, India where she has studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997. (https://shilpagupta.com/about/)
19Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana Begum lives and works in London. In 1999, Begum graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and in 2002 gained an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art. (https://www.ranabegum.com/bio)
Kriti is a curator, researcher and educator. She is the Founder of LAND – (Learning through Arts, Narrative and Discourse). She has done her education in Masters in Art History from National Museum Institute, New Delhi. Her practice resides between the intersection of creative pedagogy and contemporary art from the global south. She is the Programming Head for the Speakers’ Forum at the India Art Fair and worked at Rashtrapati Bhavan. She has also curated art educational programs at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. She has collaborated with the Helen Hamlyn Foundation, London, Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) Bangalore and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. She has worked with Singapore Arts for Good Foundation, Google Cultural Institution, and has served as chief nominator of India for sovereign Asia prize, Hong Kong.
