Nora N. Khan on “Within, Below, and Alongside” – Season 4, Episode 7

Momus: The Podcast

“A school will change you, and it teaches you as much about how people will interpret you, misunderstand and dismiss you, as it will teach you about a creative life.” Critic, curator, and educator Nora N. Khan reads from "Dark Study: Within, Below, and Alongside," a feature text published in the inaugural issue of March, which starts with the question: "how to go on?" In discussion with Sky Goodden, Khan describes this question's implications for a text about the “life and death” of study, especially for first-generation immigrants studying in the US; and the effects of writing this piece in the midst of a crisis for both art education and bodies of color. "This is an effect of trauma," she says, of writing the piece. A text that operates on several levels and interweaves the personal and the proclamatory, "Dark Study" reads as both a repudiation of professionalism as we've come to know it, and a manifesto for the future potential of "mastery" in the arts.