Neha Choksi | Elementary
Recess with Children | Saturday, October 13, 2018
2-4 PM | Main Gallery

Neha Choksi is developing a durational work in Los Angeles, where she will be attending elementary school this year as a student. Elementary is part of Choksi’s larger Play!School! project that questions childhood as a limited category and extends childhood’s epistemic processes to foster new understandings about how we organize and address contemporary civil society. Social and cultural experiments have created some understanding of the process of being watched and watching, but Play!School!tweaks it by questioning many of the boundaries, hierarchies, and fantasies around the “civilizing” process of education.

Being socialized anew by her classmates, Choksi hopes to transform the discussion around child/adult hierarchies and self/other intersectionally.  The accumulated experience in the classroom during her Elementary project will help shape her (and our) perception of who we are and want to be, how we arrive at our ideas about self/other, childhood/adulthood, naïve/civilized, and more.  For 18th Street’s Main Gallery, Choksi will reflect on her experience as a student and invite children from the larger Los Angeles community to co-create sited installations, to contribute drawings and notes, and interact with and participate in live art onsite.

In Recess with Children, children will interact with the artist in creating a new piece. Ages 5 to 7 welcome with parents. RSVP here to participate.