Global Art Forum is Art Dubai’s critically-acclaimed annual transdisciplinary arts conference, which combines original thinking and contemporary themes in an intimate, live environment.

Following on from last year’s theme of automation, Global Art Forum 2019 unites a diverse cast of global minds – from renowned curators and critics to educationalists and entrepreneurs – under the theme of “School is a Factory?” to address some of the urgent challenges and opportunities facing education today.

In the lead up the two-day summit, its co-directors Victoria Camblin and Fawz Kabra asked some of this year’s speakers a few fun questions on their unique educational paths, if school prepared them for real life and just how optimistic they are about the future of education.

First in the series is Antonia Carver, director of Art Jameel which includes the recently-opened contemporary arts museum Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai:

Describe your first experience using technology at school

I’m so old that I can remember the arrival of the ‘micro-lab’ at school in the 80s. Being in fourth division maths, we were the last to get access (once a week) to the beige and brown clunky keyboards plugged into boxy TV monitors. Ironically, I remember it being about actually engaging with the machine itself (aka coding) rather than its output. That experimental intimacy would of course quickly disappear as computers became more sophisticated and widespread.

Antonia Carver, 2019, Director of Art Jameel, Potrait courtesy of Art Jameel

Where did you first learn about art?

1970s curriculum governance was a bit more free-wheeling than today. One primary school teacher was an artist and adopted a ‘screw maths, let’s art’ kind of approach. Hence, the fourth division.

Did school prepare you for “real life”? If not, what did?

No. Playing in an orchestra and weekend jobs in a restaurant and an old people’s home did.

Jameel Arts Centre, 2019,  Courtesy of Art Jameel, Photo by  Rory Gardiner

What did you have to unlearn after school?

That grades matter more than practical skills and emotional intelligence. That the world revolved around the Euro-America axis. That everything you learnt in Maths class is irrelevant except how to do percentages.