The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #4 | Outside the Circle

An invitation to witness and respond to a season of radical emancipation, resistance, survival and collective action inspired by intersectional feminist and queer movements.

Cooper Gallery’s highly commended five-chapter project The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation returns this autumn to intensify its exploration of what art education is and who it serves by focusing on the ‘practices of knowing’ constitutive of intersectional feminist and queer movements.

Inspired by the essential words of African-American writer, feminist and civil right activist Audre Lorde in her seminal essay ‘The Master's Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, the title of the latest exhibition Outside the Circle stands as an invitation to witness and respond to a season of radical emancipation, resistance, survival and collective action.

Indexed by Dundee’s proud history of strong working-class women’s culture that led to the name ‘She Town’, Sit-in #4 will be a group exhibition of artworks and archival material inspired by and generated from feminist and queer movements since the beginning of the 20th century that foregrounds feminist and queer strategies of resistance, survival and collective action as critical and pedagogical ‘ruptures’ in our lived experience.

Composed of archives, drawings, ephemera, manifestos, paintings, photography, sculptures, video works and writings inspired by and generated from feminist and queer movements the exhibiting artists, activists, collectives, writers, and thinkers include: Sam Ainsley, Anne Bean, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Phyllis Christopher, Akwugo Emejulu, Alexis Hunter, Tari Ito, Derek Jarman, Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacy, Audre Lorde, Katharine Meynell, Annabel Nicolson, Griselda Pollock, Monica Ross, Georgina Starr, Marlene Smith, Jo Spence, Maud Sulter, Ajamu X, alongside collectives including: Womenifesto (Thailand), Castlemilk Womanhouse (Scotland), Haven for Artists (Lebanon), Cyber feminist group Old Boys Network (Germany), The Combahee River Collective (USA), Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (UK), The Hackney Flashers (UK), Feministo: Women’s Postal Art Event (UK).

Enthused with the modalities of fabulation, radical imagination and solidarity of feminist and queer politics, Outside the Circle will include a significant body of archival and ephemeral material loaned from collectives, special collections, and the exhibiting artists to delineate a genealogy of feminist and queer archiving, self-publishing and zine making as a site of political and institutional critique.

Exhibition highlights will include a cornucopia of artworks, video and archival material.

Outside the Circle features rarely seen footage that captures a largely unpublicized chapter in the life of Audre Lorde when she lived in Berlin between 1984-1992 and played an instrumental role in igniting the Afro-German movement which made lasting contributions to the political and cultural landscape of Germany. There will also be an opportunity to see landmark works by Japanese performance artist Tari Ito. Largely unknown in the UK Ito’s works from the 1980s onwards, challenged social taboos of sexuality and identity in Japanese society. Depicting the ethos of women speaking truth to power, Outside the Circle presents compelling examples of the renowned Indian artist and Women's Rights activist Sheba Chhachhi’s evocative photographic works of the street play Om Swaha that emerged out of the Autonomous Women’s Movement in India in the 1980s.

Conceived by Womanifesto, a women artist’s collective with an avowed international outlook rooted on a farm in Thailand, WeMend is a participatory installation foregrounding the necessity of listening to others in collective endeavours. WeMend will unite with other pieces created on multiple locations across continents and will be displayed at the Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025. Georgina Starr’s iconoclastic performance Flesh (Six Sculptures) at the Royal Academy in 2008 can be witnessed, alongside the archive cared for by Starr of the largely unacknowledged queer artist Ronald Wright. In addition there will be artworks and archival material drawn from the first cohort of esteemed feminist theorist and scholar Griselda Pollock’s ground-breaking MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts (MAFEM 1993–2003), Judy Chicago’s pioneering Feminist Art Programme (Fresno State College 1970–1993 and CalArts 1971–1975), and the first international Cyberfeminist alliance, the Old Boys Network (1997–c.2001). Outside the Circle will also celebrate Scottish-Ghanaian artist, poet and feminist activist Maud Sulter with her magnificent photographic work from her Cibachrome portraits series, Zabat and archives from her collaborative self-publishing projects. Sam Ainsley, the inspiring teacher and feminist artist, who has been the driving force for cultivating a feminist centred curriculum (GSA 1985–2006) empowering female students and raising a feminist consciousness in male students, and the radical women artists and activists in early 20th century Dundee; Ethel Moorhead and Mary Brooksbank.Indexing the undeniable centrality of the body in Outside the Circle the exhibition includes a slogan painting by Derek Jarman and ephemera capturing the passion and rage of Jarman’s political voice in the Gay Rights Movement, Phyllis Christopher’s fearless and tender photographic works portraying street, club, and studio as a pedagogical community that articulates the determination of queer sexuality in the face of right-wing politics, the AIDS crisis and the urban gentrification of the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco, and the eloquent photographic works by Ajamu X that explore embodied knowledge and “unapologetically celebrate the materiality of the black queer body, the erotic senses, joy, intimacies, and pleasure as freedom.”

Activating the histories, experiences and ideas embedded in the exhibition and exploring the socially and politically progressive role feminist and queer pedagogical and collective actions have and continue to play in transforming civic society,Outside the Circle will be expanded by Sit-in Curriculum #4, a series of public events developed and facilitated by practitioners from feminist and LGBTQ+ communities that reveal in all their radical complexity and zeal, the global legacies and future promise of feminist and queer acts of emancipation and pedagogy, and their absolute relevance for all of us in these precarious times.

Celebrating the socially embedded acts of knowledge production characteristic of feminist and queer activism Outside the Circle will culminate in 12 Hour Acting Up, an international coalition of artists, activists, culture workers, educators, musicians, performers, students, researchers, writers, and feminist and LGBTQ+ communities in Scotland and from around the world. A concrete manifestation of feminist and social activist bell hook’s radical vision of a ‘field of possibility’, 12 Hour Acting Up will be a sustained cross-disciplinary context and dynamic environment for diverse participants and audiences. Manoeuvring between collective readings, performances, music, storytelling, keynote talks, street theatre, round table discussions, screenings, and workshops, 12 Hour Acting Up will compose a constellation of affective memories and cogent critical reflections.

The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation is a five-chapter exhibition and event project that runs until 2025. Programmed by Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. Bringing together artists, designers, educators, activists, cultural workers, students and other publics The Ignorant Art School questions what art education is and whom it serves. Enthused with revolutionary solidarity and organised as a collaborating collective The Ignorant Art School creatively re-imagine and co-constitutes radical blueprints for a socially transformative art education that opens towards an emancipated future.