On Education brings together works by 35 international artists that engage with the subject of education from unconventional perspectives. This exhibition resists the utopian narratives and aims that often frame art’s engagement with pedagogy, instead foregrounding the traumas and forms of violence—both real and symbolic—that are intrinsic to the process of being educated. On Education examines the mechanisms of surveillance and control that structure spaces of learning, explores artmaking as a potential tool for counterhegemonic resistance, and interrogates the social and cultural conditioning of childhood and child-rearing. It acknowledges the precarity and challenges of learning in an environment of constantly disrupted attention shaped by endemic underfunding, spiraling culture wars, unsustainable debt, and the lasting impacts of racism and colonialism. At the same time, in tracing these conditions, the exhibition also gestures toward alternative, more productive models for the future.

Departing from the participatory and discussion-based models that have predominated in contemporary art’s engagement with education over the past two decades, On Education returns to the object, spanning painting, photography, sound, sculpture, installation, video, spatial interventions, and archival material. The exhibition makes a case for the object as a counterpoint to the digitalization of learning, a shift that has accompanied education’s financialization and privatization since the 1990s and has accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic. The works collected in this exhibition reflect personal experiences of teaching and being taught, explore the use of artworks in experimental pedagogies, and propose sustained aesthetic contemplation as a still-potent method of meaning-making.

Through its multifaceted exploration of education’s structures, contradictions, and possibilities, On Education invites viewers to reconsider the ways knowledge is shaped, transmitted, and contested—both within and beyond the walls of the classroom.