Cooper Gallery DJCAD will be holding a 12 Hour international symposium, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel, one of the culminating events of their ongoing programme the Ignorant Art School, which will be held at Dundee Botanic Garden on Sat. 25th June (11am – 11pm).
The event will be a 12-hour open-air conversations, dance, music, performance, readings, screenings, workshops, and food to re-imagine art education and unsettle systems of knowledge.
It will feature esteemed figures including Sam Ainsley and David Harding, who established and led the influential Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art which produced many Turner Prize winners and nominees; Prof. Regina Bittner, Head of the Academy and Deputy Director at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation; Gudskul, the educational platform of Jakarta-based artists collectives ruangrupa, who are curating the 2022 edition of Documenta15, one of the most important contemporary art events in the world; Serubiri Moses, a Ugandan curator based in New York who was one of the curators of the 10th Berlin Biennale; Kapil Seshasayee, a celebrated Scottish-Indian musician whose work was lauded by The Guardian as “one of the most promising debut albums to come out of Scotland in recent years”; Ross Sinclair, a long-established artist and alumni of Environmental Art course at GSA who is now a professor of Contemporary Art Practice at GSA; and critically recognised artists Barby Asante, Hardeep Pandhal, and more.
The event will also screen O Horizon, a feature-length film by Turner Prize nominees, artists collective The Otolith Group, which reflects on the poetry and experimental teaching techniques of Bengali polymath and the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature Rabindranath Tagore.
Sat. 25th June (11am – 11pm)Venue: Dundee Botanic Garden
Register for free tickets via Eventbrite
Re-imagining art education and unsettling systems of knowledge, The Ignorant Art School in the shade of trees in summertime will cultivate alternative futures, determined not by what we know, but by how we learn, unlearn, create and share knowledge together. In the words of the visionary Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel will activate a landscape “where the mind is without fear, the head is held high and where knowledge is free.”
Inhabiting Dundee’s Botanic Garden and timed by Ruth Ewan’s revolutionary decimal clock, the revel will host a convivial convergence for visions and praxes of radical, ethical and accessible pedagogies that question what art education is and who it serves. Addressing knowledge as a collaborative, collective and social experience, the revel will manifest the actual plurality of lived perspectives that constitute our world.
Radical in intent and collaborative by nature, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel will bring together a coalition of artists, activists, culture workers, educators, musicians, performers, students, thinkers, writers, and various communities in Scotland and from around the world to sing and dance, to observe and reflect, to listen and watch, to converse, question, and so constitute a ‘field of possibility’ (bell hooks).
Celebrating equality of access with a generous solidarity, the 12 Hour Sit-in Revel asserts the potential of transforming knowledge from a capitalist commodity to an emancipatory power available to all.
Contributors:
Sam Ainsley (artist and educator)
Saoirse Amira Anis (artist)
Adam Benmakhlouf (artist and DJCAD doctoral candidate)
Rabindranath X Bhose (artist)
Regina Bittner (Head of the Academy and Deputy Director, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Anne-Marie Copestake (artist and educator)
Jemma Desai (writer and researcher) & Barby Asante (artist, curator and educator)
Ruth Ewan (artist)
Len Goetzee (artist)
Gudskul (educational knowledge-sharing platform of Jakarta-based artists collectives ruangrupa, Serrum, and Grafis Huru Hara)
David Harding (artist and educator)
Ashanti Harris (artist) & Mele Broomes (artist)
Frances Lingard (artist)
Jade Montserrat (artist, researcher and activist)
Harun Morrison (artist and writer)
Serubiri Moses (curator and writer)
Hardeep Pandhal and Joe Howe (MIDIevil x Spider Knife)
Undine Sellbach (artist and lecturer)
Kapil Seshasayee (musician)
Ross Sinclair (artist and educator)
Ranjana Thapalyal (artist and writer) & Hamshya Rajkumar (artist)
Grant Watson (curator)
Awuor Onyango (artist)
The Otolith Group (artist collective)