What if intelligence isn’t something we learn or are taught? Children’s Ways of Knowing, a film program, 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 and Curatorial Program (ISCP), 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.

Ane Hjort Guttu’s How to Become a Non-Artist 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, 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 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 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 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey follows the 80 min screening program.