Art as Unlearning - Arts-based Research and Transcultural Education

In the context of a world that is challenged by crises of nation states, economization and environmental destruction that reinforce already existing and bring about new forms of migration, ‘unlearning’ has emerged as a term in discussions of alternative education and feminist, postcolonial and decolonial theory. This research project builds on the insights and energies developed in and around the debates on unlearning, and it introduces arts-based research into the debates on what unlearning might do and be.

Connecting the fields of politically engaged art practices, the educational turn in art, and the transcultural discourse on modernity in education, Art as Unlearning investigates arts-based contexts that have transformed understandings of learning within modernist projects of education. In form of collaborative studies , this research involves groups of actors with non-Western backgrounds in order to study and practice specific situations of unlearning , in which artistic practice has played a vital role in a transcultural perspective. This approach will make it possible to respond to the overall question of this research: What constitutes an arts-based approach towards unlearning in a transcultural perspective?