Outside the Circle

Cooper Gallery’s 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 whom 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 rights activist Audre Lorde in her seminal essay “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, Outside the Circle is an invitation to witness and participate in a season of radical emancipation, resistance, survival and collective action from both western and Global Majority countries.

Indexed by Dundee’s proud sobriquet “She Town” and driven by the necessity to decolonise Euro-centric narratives, Sit-in #4 of The Ignorant Art School declares that no one should stand outside the circle of what the dominant political narrative defines as “acceptable.”

Reverberating with the attitude, poise and pose of feminist and queer “acting up” that speaks the difficult truths of lived experience and social knowledge courageously to power, Outside the Circle unfolds the possibilities of assembly, collective actions and spirited protest as pedagogical interventions that defiantly empower the oppressed and marginalised.

Among the archives, drawings, ephemera, manifestos, paintings, performance, photographs, sculptures, video works and writings inspired by and generated from feminist and queer movements, Outside the Circle brings together a dazzling spectrum of artists, activists, collectives, writers, and thinkers including: Sam Ainsley with Anne-Marie Copestake, Anne Bean, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Phyllis Christopher, Akwugo Emejulu, Margaret Harrison, Barbara Howey, Carol Massey Lingard and Jenny Stevens, Alexis Hunter, Tari Ito, Derek Jarman, Amelia Jones, Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacy, Audre Lorde, Katharine Meynell, Annabel Nicolson, nussatari, Griselda Pollock, Monica Ross, Georgina Starr, Marlene Smith, Jo Spence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Maud Sulter, Ronald Wright, Ajamu X, alongside collective actions and groups including Blk Art Group, Castlemilk Womanhouse, Cyber feminist collective Old Boys Network, Fenix, Feministo: Women’s Postal Art Event, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Haven for Artists, Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, The Hackney Flashers, OutRage!, Womanifesto, Womanhouse and Women in Profile.

A unique highlight of the exhibition is the opportunity to explore rarely seen video footage of Audre Lorde in Berlin (1984–92) where she played an instrumental role in igniting the Afro-German movement. Although largely unpublicized this last chapter of her life reasserted Lorde’s dedication to the power of self-knowledge and how “the responsibility of the poet is to speak the truth as she sees it”.

Enthused with modalities of fabulation, radical imagination and solidarity Outside the Circle includes a significant body of archival and ephemeral material loaned from collectives, special collections, and artists to delineate a genealogy of feminist and queer archiving, grassroots publishing and zine making as a site of critical pedagogy.

Sit-in Curriculum #4
Activating the politically progressive role feminist and queer collective and pedagogical actions have and continue to play in transforming civic society, Outside the Circle is expanded by Sit-in Curriculum #4, a series of public events that reveal in all their radical complexity and zeal, the global legacies and future promise of feminist and queer acts of emancipatory pedagogy in these precarious times.

Composing a constellation of affective memories and cogent critical reflections rooted in collective readings, performances, music, keynote talks, street theatre, round table discussions and screenings, Outside the Circle culminates in 12 Hour Acting Up. Featuring 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, 12 Hour Acting Up is a concrete manifestation of feminist and social activist bell hooks’ radical vision of a “field of possibility.”

About The Ignorant Art School
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.