The kNOw school

Abstract

In January 2023 the Anga Art Collective met with Kelly Hussey-Smith for an online conversation abouttheir practice and collective approach to art making. Anga Art Collective’s work explores artist-ledpublic pedagogy through friendship and modes of collectivity, performance, and interventions in publicspace. Emerging from fifteen years of art, friendship, public interventions, and inter-disciplinarydialogue the fifteen-member collective use creative practice and public pedagogy to explore localcontexts and issues in Assam. Their practice shows how collective approaches to knowledgeproduction, 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 andrepresentations of national identity in contemporary India. Over time, the school has developed into aseries of pedagogic and epistemological questions about knowledge production, knowledgehierarchies, and contextual learning. Concerned with local knowledge and regional plurality, theirprojects and interventions range from workshops with young people to curatorial projects that bothstrengthen regional bonds and challenge art world hierarchies. Through these site-specificcollaborations and interventions, they generate collective questions about how public pedagogy mightcontribute 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 theAnga Art Collective in Assam, and journal co-editor Kelly Hussey-Smith in Naarm, we explore Anga ArtCollective's (d)evolving practice as a form of relational, durational and iterative public pedagogy.