The kNOw school

a post-disciplinary adventure in artist-led public pedagogy

Abstract

In January 2023 the Anga Art Collective met with Kelly Hussey-Smith for an online conversation about
their practice and collective approach to art making. Anga Art Collective’s work explores artist-led
public pedagogy through friendship and modes of collectivity, performance, and interventions in public
space. Emerging from fifteen years of art, friendship, public interventions, and inter-disciplinary
dialogue the fifteen-member collective use creative practice and public pedagogy to explore local
contexts and issues in Assam. Their practice shows how collective approaches to knowledge
production, learning and creativity can be dynamic forces in generating and sustaining relations.
In 2020 the collective established The kNOw School as a response to monolithic narratives and
representations of national identity in contemporary India. Over time, the school has developed into a
series of pedagogic and epistemological questions about knowledge production, knowledge
hierarchies, and contextual learning. Concerned with local knowledge and regional plurality, their
projects and interventions range from workshops with young people to curatorial projects that both
strengthen regional bonds and challenge art world hierarchies. Through these site-specific
collaborations and interventions, they generate collective questions about how public pedagogy might
contribute to practices of equality and solidarity and contribute to a vision of a more egalitarian society.
In this conversational interview, edited from an online video conversation between five members of the
Anga Art Collective in Assam, and journal co-editor Kelly Hussey-Smith in Naarm, we explore Anga Art
Collective's (d)evolving practice as a form of relational, durational and iterative public pedagogy.