Donkeyfull Mind
2019 | Study of Walker Art Center by Molla Nasrudin’s Donkey
Collaboration with Pedram Baldari and Molla Nasreddin
"Inspired by Al-Ghazali’s story of outlaws offering educational advice, Pedram Baldari and Nooshin Hakim Javadi invited a donkey to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, its saddle bags heavy with art history books. The donkey’s garden tours conjure another set of stories: the tales of Molla Nasreddin, a putatively wise man who is in constant conflict with his beast. The satires pit human folly against asinine stubbornness, never settling on where wisdom may be found—in man or beast." By Christina Schmid at Walker Art Magazine
“Curated by Carry on home .
Christina Schmid :
”This is how the story goes: When Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali concluded his studies in Nishapur, he loaded his hand-written notes and books on a donkey’s back and joined a caravan to head home. Bandits ambushed the caravan and proceeded to rob the travelers of their valuables. Al-Ghazali begged them to spare his most precious possessions: the fruits of his long education. Eagerly, the bandits opened the donkey’s bags. When they found only papers and pages covered in writing, their leader said to the scholar: “All of your knowledge fits on the back of a donkey? Maybe you should consider pursuing a different kind of knowledge.” Until the end of his life, Al-Ghazali recounted this incident as the best advice on education he ever got.[1]:
“the roles of knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies, and knowledge institutions” are far from neutral, as Linda Tuiwai Smith argues, but always “the site of significant struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other.”[3]
Education, as a practice of sharing knowledge, is intimately entangled with these political, institutional, and philosophical concerns of knowledge production and distribution. Who is hailed as a potential knower, who as an object to be studied and known? What constitutes knowledge? Which histories churn underneath polite institutional veneers? Revealing the deep structures that give rise to how knowing, learning, and teaching unfold in a specific cultural context is central to CarryOn Homes’ curatorial vision. Oliveiro, SaiK Lee, Hakim Javadi, and Baldari all have experience in educational systems that originate outside of the United States, systems that come with their own set of promises and problems.[4]
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