STUDENTS’ BIENNALE 2018 | ABOUT

FICA continued its collaboration with Kochi Biennale Foundation to shape the third of Students’ Biennale 2018. SB 2018 involved a multilateral approach, featuring an exhibition, an education forum, and field-based research on the condition of art education as it stands, leading up to an international conference to bring together pedagogues and artists to discuss the changing scope of art education in the 21st century. For more information on earlier editions of Students’ Biennale click here.

The Exhibition Platform was led by a team of six curators and driven through an open call for applications from art students to activate ideas around ‘Making as Thinking’. SB provided a production support for selected projects and artworks by Indian students. It also expanded its scope to include participation of students from other SAARC countries, namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. For more information on the Students’ Biennale, click here.   

FICA spearheaded the Expanded Education Programme, the other key initiative of SB. EEP was introduced as a pilot in the 2018 Edition to undertake a long-term enquiry into the paradigms from within which art students emerge into the world – their institutions, educators/mentors and their local contexts of learning.  

The future of art pedagogy is being discussed in many places in the world around key issues of quality, relevance and access. These urgent dialogues move from a larger critical positioning of art, the role of the artist and what constitutes art education, to more specific challenges that students are facing whether around debt, imposition of standardised curriculums or the impoverishment and the dismantling of public sector (art) education. EEP emerged out of this desire to be locally attentive and rooted to the conditions of higher art education in the Indian context and at the same time participate in this global dialogue on the question of art pedagogy.  

As part of EEP, we organised a series of nine workshops, spread across the country at art institutions and centres. These workshops were envisioned as series of engagements with students and teachers to identify existing frameworks of learning across art colleges in India, and to imagine new directions in pedagogical practices within and around these institutions.

We invited nine educators who individually or in collaboration with a colleague, conceptualised and ran workshops specific to the colleges and sites that had been identified by the programme. As professionals - artists, curators, art historians, performers, institution builders and as teachers - they brought a wealth of knowledge with them with the common aim of creating an optimal space for learning.

The workshops ran until November 2018 and were followed by an international conference titled Pedagogical In-Flux and the Art of Education which took place in Kochi on March 21-22, 2019.  The conference explored the systemic shifts in global (art) education that is redefining the roles and significance of art schools as one of the primary spaces of learning and knowledge production. It extended key questions that emerged from the Programme, focusing on learner-centric and artist/educator-led pedagogy, technologies of teaching, new materialism and processes of making, and the significance of locations/site in artistic practices. 

An online publication on the Expanded Education Programme and the conference are now available. Compiled by Vidya Shivadas, Bhooma Padmanabhan and Agastaya Thapa, the document covers all aspects of EEP with an aim to make them available to educators, researchers, artists and other interested readers. It preserves the original categories of workshops as prototypes which can be imagined in various ways. It addresses educators who could turn to them as resources when thinking about their own practices and locations.

We are grateful to the organisations that supported the making of this platform.

Supported by Tata Trusts

Education Partners
Swiss Arts Council Prohelvetia
Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation
The Raza Foundation
Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
Sandeep & Geetanjali Maini Foundation 
Institut Francais India  
The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts
U.S. Consulate in India