Event
November 17, 2025, 6:30–8:30pm

Children’s Ways of Knowing

What if intelligence isn’t something we learn or are taught? This film program, curated by ISCP resident Abirami Logendran, suggests intelligence is already present in how children engage with their worlds—through aesthetic perception and intuitive experimentation. Children demonstrate forms of intelligence rooted in embodied experience and collaborative practice, ways of knowing that challenge what typically counts as intelligence. Rather than treating intelligence as something to be acquired through formal education, this program positions children as sophisticated thinkers and artists whose perceptions and capacities are shaped by different contexts, cultures, and modes of engagement with the world.

Children’s Ways of Knowing is presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its 2025–2027 Matter of Intelligence Focus Theme in collaboration with the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). It is presented at the Kellen Auditorium, The New School, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue, 1st floor, New York. Please register here to attend.

Ane Hjort Guttu’s How to Become a Non-Artist (2007) documents her four-year-old son’s arrangements of everyday objects, tracing a process where distinctions between art and non-art dissolve entirely. In Adelita Husni Bey’s Postcards from the Desert Island (2010–11), students at an experimental anarchist school practice collective self-management, demonstrating capacities for cooperation and decision-making through the collaborative construction of a desert island. Aslı Baykal’s Darkroom (2023) captures children in conflict zones experiencing photography as magic through an itinerant workshop, using analogue processes to imagine new worlds for themselves. Tiffany Sia’s A Child Already Knows (2024) examines fragmentary memory and political witnessing through a child’s retelling of escape from Shanghai, where television and early Mao-era animation become sites of meaning-making. Together, these films reveal intelligence as relational, material, and situated, emerging not from instruction but from children’s active engagement with their environments. Positioned within broader cultural and political terrains, where education, labor, witnessing, and imagination are sites of power, the children in these films demonstrate forms of attunement, resistance and collective survival.

A conversation with curator Abirami Logendran, artist Aslı Baykal, and 2020–22 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey follows the 80 minute screening program.

Children’s Ways of Knowing is curated by Abirami Logendran in collaboration with Eriola Pira as part of Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. This screening is presented in collaboration with the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), with additional support by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).

6:30–8:30pm

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Participating Residents

Abirami Logendran

Ane Hjort Guttu, How to Become a Non-Artist, 2007, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Current and Upcoming Events & Exhibitions

Hans Rosenström: Conspirare

Opening Reception: Jun 30, 2026

June 30–October 9, 2026

Exhibition

Bryan Fernandez: En tránsito

Through August 7

Exhibition

Donate

Open Studios
November 14–November 15, 2025

2025 Fall Open Studios

Opening Reception: Friday, November 14, 6–9pm
Open Hours: Saturday, November 15, 1–6pm

The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) Fall Open Studios is a presentation of international contemporary art by the 33 artists and curators from 22 countries in residence. Guest speaker artist Martha Wilson will make remarks at 7pm during the opening reception.

This event is free and open to the public.

Three times a year, ISCP invites the public to engage with its cohort of international artist and curator residents in their individual studios. Residents present recent projects, work in progress, site-specific installations and their archives to a large audience of professionals and art enthusiasts from New York and beyond. Concentrated in a three-story postindustrial loft building in East Williamsburg, ISCP supports the creative advancement of artists and curators from around the world, presents exhibitions and talks year-round, and fosters cultural exchange. From 1994 to the present, ISCP has hosted over 2,000 alumni hailing from more than 105 countries. Today, ISCP’s Open Studios, a three-decade tradition, continues to be the organization’s signature event.

Visitors can also explore two exhibitions at ISCP: Carried Over, guest curated by TK Smith, and Maya Jeffereis: Land of Eternal Summer, curated by Melinda Lang, Director of Programs and Exhibitions. Carried Over explores the creative strategies of Braxton Garneau, Remy Jungerman, and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, three ISCP alumni with African and Indigenous roots, who tell profound stories of place and displacement, of resilience and resistance. Ground Floor resident Maya Jeffereis debuts a new video installation for her exhibition that reframes overlooked histories of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil through a poetic blend of archival documentation, firsthand accounts and experimental film techniques.

Open Studios participating artists and curators:

Hissa Al-Khuzaei (Qatar); Ghazaleh Avarzamani (United Kingdom/Canada); Wendimagegn Belete (Ethiopia/Norway); Arini Byng (Australia/United States); Karin Fisslthaler (Austria); Rafaela Foz (Brazil); Ella Gonzales (Canada); Antonietta Grassi (Canada); Hermann Grüneberg (Germany); Katharina Gruzei (Austria); Ronald Hall (United States); Hong Seon Jang (South Korea/United States); Maya Jeffereis (United States); Cassie Augusta Jørgensen (Denmark/Germany); Manjot Kaur (India/Canada); Gunilla Klingberg (Sweden); Ailyn Lee (South Korea/United States); Kris Lemsalu (Estonia); Sujin Lim (South Korea/United States); Simon Liu (Hong Kong/United States); Abirami Logendran (Norway); Umber Majeed (United States); Inge Meijer (The Netherlands); Irène Mélix (Germany); Eva Richardson McCrea (Germany/Ireland); Grace Rosario Perkins (United States); Neda Saeedi (Iran/Germany); Keli Safia Maksud (Tanzania/Canada); Swapnaa Tamhane (Canada/India); Clio Van Aerde (Luxembourg); Marianne Villière (France); Sasha Wortzel (United States); Sarah Zapata (United States)

ISCP thanks the following residency sponsors:

Alice and Lawrence Weiner; Associação dos Artistas e Produtores do Centro de São Paulo (ASP); British Columbia Arts Council; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Canada Council for the Arts; Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec; Creative Australia; Danish Arts Foundation; Danna and Ed Ruscha; Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg; Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center; Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria; Fire Station – Qatar Museums; Hartfield Foundation; Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; IASPIS – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists; KdFS – Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen; Kunststiftung des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt; Leon Polk Smith Foundation; Mondriaan Fund; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; The Dr. K. David G. Edwards & Margery Edwards Charitable Giving Fund; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

This program is also generously supported, in part, by the Austrian Cultural Forum; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Consulate General of Sweden; Consulate General of the Netherlands; Grimm Artisanal Ales; Hartfield Foundation; Materials for the Arts; James Rosenquist Foundation; Royal Norwegian Consulate General; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council Member for the 34th District; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York State Senator Julia Salazar; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Summer Water; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.

In addition to the many individuals who support ISCP, the members of Director’s Circle are also thanked for their largesse: Anne Altchek, Barbara van Beuren, Younghee Kim-Wait, Doreen Small, and Laurie Sprayregen.

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Please note that the entrance to ISCP has seven steps and a ramp, which is ADA compliant. There are seven artist studios and one exhibition space which can be accessed on the first floor of ISCP. There is an accessible bathroom on the first floor at the end of the hallway, up one step, where the artist studios are located. To access the second floor there is a staircase with a grab bar installed on the right side with 22 steps. The second floor has 22 artist and curator studios, one exhibition space, and a lounge where remarks by our guest speaker will take place. To access the third floor there is a staircase with a grab bar installed on the right side with 24 steps. The third floor has five artist and curator studios. ISCP can access a freight elevator to bring visitors between the first and second floors on request.

ISCP can offer two reserved parking spaces on request for people with disabilities. Please email programs@iscp-nyc.org to request a parking space and/or freight elevator usage.

Opening Reception: Nov 14, 2025, 6–9pm

Open Hours: 1–6pm

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Karin Fisslthaler, Sie puppt mit Puppen/ She Dolls with Dollies, 2024, found-footage animation, 2:45 min.

Current and Upcoming Events & Exhibitions

Hans Rosenström: Conspirare

Opening Reception: Jun 30, 2026

June 30–October 9, 2026

Exhibition

Bryan Fernandez: En tránsito

Through August 7

Exhibition

Donate

Event
November 11, 2025, 6pm

Robertas Narkus Performance: Shoft Plower

ISCP alum Robertas Narkus’s project for the 2025 Performa Biennial expands his ongoing exploration of virtual worlds, the performed self, and the multiplicity of identities shaped by social media and urban life in New York. Building on earlier works such as Prospect Revenge (2018-ongoing), which navigated the intersections of publicity, spectacle, and community, Narkus’s new performance unfolds as a sprawling, scripted scenario.

Shoft Plower is presented at Performa Hub, 424 Broadway New York, New York, as part of the Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls, organized in collaboration with the Lithuanian Culture Institute. It is co-presented by the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, New York, and Rupert Center for Art in Vilnius.

Robertas Narkus is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Palanga, Lithuania, whose practice spans installation, happenings, performance and social entrepreneurship. He finds inspiration in an ethos of optimism and the myth of progress. Teetering on the edge of satire, Narkus’s works employ humor to interrogate social behavior and norms, performative masculinity, the culture of achievement, and the boundaries between the absurd and the cringe-worthy. He has presented work at XII Baltic Triennial, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Lithuania; Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art, Lithuania; KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Latvia; de Appel, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Whitechapel Gallery, United Kingdom; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Eastcontemporary, Italy; and Temninkova & Kasela, Estonia; among others. In 2022, Narkus represented Lithuania at the 59th Venice Biennale.

6pm

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