Ways of Knowing is a programme of art and ideas bringing us into dialogue with alternative ways of thinking about our relationship to the world. Through an emerging and inter-connected programme of live events and digital projects which centre otherwise peripheral knowledges, Ways of Knowing questions what we can know and how we can come to know it.
The programme offers a spectrum of approaches to key themes that are essential to contemporary society, culture and politics. Through the programme, Whitechapel Gallery invites you to explore new ways of listening to and learning from ideas and environments in non-linear ways.
Over time, the programme will identify emergent ideas and research, by asking questions and inviting new perspectives, projects and partners. Together we can question the knowledges we are privileging, consider what we are overlooking, and propose ways to multiply our centres.
January – April 2022
Ways of Knowing explores ideas around work and process, inspired by A Century of the Artist’s Studio. Join artists, architects, writers, filmmakers and critical thinkers as we explore these questions together.
September – December 2021
Ways of Knowing expands on questions around clay posed by artist Theaster Gates to explore the political significance of geological matter. This season brings different perspectives to how we think about what exists beneath our feet.
April – July 2021
This series of events invites artists and thinkers to investigate contemporary fluidities and new imaginations of water, at a moment when our human relationship to it is arguably at its most strained.
May 2021 – May 2022
Updated weekly on Mondays over a year, Important Books presents the first comprehensive sonic history of the manifesto in art and politics, crucially read aloud by children – those who will shape the artistic, social and political realms in years to come.
Ongoing
Phoebe Boswell’s figurative and multidisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Underpinned by a porous, diasporic consciousness, she explores notions of inter/personal freedom, protest, grief, intimacy, migration, embodiment and world-making through the prism of race and gender, collective histories and possible futures.
Ongoing
The Word for Water is Whale explores the interconnectedness of memory, travel and knowledge transmission via deep listening required to further understand our world and those with whom we share it.
