Experiential Knowledge for Business and Management Students

In 2009 I participated in, and helped design and lead, three very special events at The Whitechapel Gallery, London.
The events were stimulated by visiting The Nature of The Beast exhibition of London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga, widely acclaimed for her sculptural installations of historic objects and documents. Creating complex networks of reference they are poignant reminders of the profound relation between aesthetics and politics. For this, the first in a series of year-long artists’ commissions, Macuga conceived a unique venue for public gatherings which references a key moment in the Whitechapel Gallery’s history. In 1939 the Gallery hosted Picasso’s Guernica, an outcry against Fascist war atrocities, to drum up support for the Republican forces fighting in Spain.
The exhibition room had been designed to accommodate meetings, discussions and debates around a central table, with Picasso’s Guernica as a backdrop. Groups were invited to organise events free of charge during opening hours.
This proved a fantastic opportunity to further my work with colleagues, including Clive Holtham, on using cultural spaces to enhance the capabilities of students of business and management . If you are given a good offer, accept it! Build on it and reincorporate it into your work. Check out a previous posting about one of these Whitechapel events. These are also documented in a book about the entire exhibition and the many projects that resulted.

The recent EKSIG Conference on Experiential Knowledge in Farnham was an excellent forum to disseminate the lessons learnt from these Whitechapel Gallery events.
What was most pleasing about the conference were the large number of questions stimulated by the presentation.