Curatorial Work → Staying with Art
Staying with Art is a participatory research project developed as part of the Nordic Master in Visual Studies and Art Education (NoVA) at Aalborg University and Aalto University during spring 2025.
Created in collaboration with fellow students Anna Schmidt and Hanna Tokaj, the project took place at an international school in Copenhagen—a context marked by high student turnover, cultural diversity, and shifting group dynamics. This raised a central question: How can collaborative art education support belonging and community in classrooms shaped by cultural diversity and constant change?
To explore this, we designed and facilitated two art-based interventions with students aged 13–15, testing a series of co-creative exercises—from blind portrait drawing and sound-based mark-making to group sculpture and collective flag-making. Drawing on feminist and critical pedagogical theory—particularly Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges and Claire Bishop’s critique of participatory art—we worked closely with the tensions, affective shifts, and relational entanglements that arise in collaborative artistic processes.
Rather than aiming for consensus or harmony, Staying with Art embraced discomfort, negotiation, and uneven participation as meaningful parts of situated learning. We created a spiral model of intervention, allowing for ongoing reflection and adaptation, and centering process over product—balancing theory and practice, structure and improvisation.
The project invited students—and ourselves as researchers and facilitators—to reimagine art education not simply as a space for individual expression, but as a social and dialogic practice: one that can hold space for difference, support co-authorship, and help build moments of community through art.