Looking beyond the classroom with Hicham Benohoud’s The Classroom
Reflecting on the Blackwood Gallery’s summer program with curator, Fraser McCallum.
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Crip Choreographic Witnessing with Jose Miguel Esteban, July 11, 2026. Photo: Henry Chan.
The Blackwood Gallery’s summer program was a lightbox exhibition and event series concerning “experimental education, movement, and creative pedagogy,” according to the gallery’s website. The program was curated by the gallery’s project coordinator Fraser McCallum, who has been in the position since 2019 and taken lead on almost a dozen art programs at UTM. The Medium spoke with McCallum to better understand the program’s concepts and significance within a university campus.
In the waning days of summer, anyone at UTM may have noticed black and white images displayed outdoors depicting students in unusual situations within a classroom. These four lightboxes scattered around the Davis and Kaneff buildings presented Hicham Benohoud’s The Classroom, a series of photographs shot between 1994 and 2002. At UTM specifically, McCallum explains that the photographs “can prompt us to think about how we learn, what the mechanisms by which knowledge is transmitted to people are, and what are different ways of doing that.”
Within the photographs selected for the program, subjects are partially hidden behind Bristol boards or students, closed within their own clothes, confined inside a hula hoop, or suspended above their peers who, in the background of every image, remain at their desks engaged in school work as usual. According to the Blackwood Gallery, these images reflect “Benohoud’s frustrations with Morocco’s rigid educational system of the time, whose curriculum of rote repetition and mimicry bored him and his students alike.” The students’ faces reflect a weariness as well, which “also hints at students’ own struggles they might be having,” shared McCallum.
Latent in the explicit imagery is the concept of a “hidden curriculum,” which McCallum described as the understanding of social norms, gender roles, conduct, ethics, morals, and all kinds of hidden values taught through socialization within a classroom. McCallum explained, “A classroom is not just a place where the explicit, the overt curriculum is taught, but it’s also the way we become citizens in a society. It teaches us ways of being together.”
While The Classroom was on display, the Blackwood Gallery itself, located in the Kaneff Centre, hosted free public programs from guest artists also focused similarly on performance and pedagogy.
In June, Professor Lucy El-Sherif and the Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts presented Itshalit wit hatit, a “strengthening and heartwarming” display of dabke, a Palestinian folk dance. July first saw PhD candidate Jose Miguel Esteban lead program participants around campus for Crip Choreographic Witnessing, allowing the group to scribe audio descriptions accompanying artwork for accessibility purposes through feeling rather than just seeing. Dr. Maya El Helou later demonstrated how to record ethnography through drawings in Sketching the Social, emphasizing “how to be a participant observer” and how “the way we look at the world also shapes it.” The last event, The Secret School of Nature, was hosted in August by artist Leila Fatemi at Visual Arts Mississauga. This program, closely aligned with The Classroom, was a children’s focused event involving Instax Polaroid cameras and a nature walk, allowing attendees to “look more closely at nature, at our everyday surroundings with different lenses—literally.”
As fall swings into session, be sure to check out this semester’s program Lines, Pattern, and Action, curated by UTM Professor Ruba Kana’an and focused on “reimagining [traditional, colonial-era Pakistani art materials and methods] in a contemporary art context.” McCallum shared that the Blackwood Gallery hopes to be a “kind of hub where different interdisciplinary conversations can happen,” reaching out to classes, student groups, and the external community alike.
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