A hidden gem in the heart of Dundee, the Cooper Gallery is hosting their ongoing five-chapter project The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation. With Outside the Circle as the fourth part in the series, they continue their exploration of art education in the context of radical emancipation, resistance, survival, and collective action. We spoke to the curator, Sophia Yadong Hao, to find out more.
Can you give me an overview of The Ignorant Art School?
The framework for everything we do is the idea of curating discourses rather than curating art objects. We create all sorts of interactive situations for people to have space for dialogue, either with the artworks or with themselves.
With social media and all sorts of information technology pervading, there can be a negative impact on how we perceive the world, ourselves, and how we understand what knowledge is. Knowledge isn’t something you learn from school, or from people more powerful than yourself.


The idea we work around is influenced by the feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who is one of the thinkers we’re featuring through this project. In the 90s, she coined the idea of ‘unlearning’, and that’s at the core of The Ignorant Art School. The intention is to examine the histories and future possibilities of art education.
We tried to find really little-known examples of political endeavour from global majority countries. We have Womanifesto, which is a feminist art collective from Thailand, and Gudskul from Indonesia – they formed a really interesting community around sustainable ecology in culture and the arts. We also worked with a British Black artist collective called The Otolith Group, and they really looked into this idea of cinema as a site for study, and explored the idea of study within Afrofuturism.
The title of Sit-In #4 is Outside the Circle, which is a quote from Audre Lorde’s seminal text The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Throughout the different waves of feminist and queer movements, there’s always this idea of being on the verge, on the margins, outside of the mainstream.


It’s so refreshing to have something so focused on education and academia that’s open to people who aren’t in art school, or in education at all.
Exactly – we are a public art gallery. If you look at the history of our programme, we almost function like a mirror to academia. We’re trying to show that knowledge isn’t always in the hands of the powerful – you can flip that around.
We’re looking at self-publishing and zine making in queer and feminist movement. These groups always made zines as a way of disseminating ideas, throughout the AIDS crisis. That was the only means for them to protect each other, to encourage each other, but also to spread medical information. So we will have a huge body of archival material that exists outside of mainstream institutions.


How do you bring these ideas into the present and bridge the gap between the past and future?
We don’t completely focus on archives; we like to use them to create a discourse around our contemporary artworks. It’s important to learn from what people have done in the past to empower themselves, especially from difficult environments and times.
For our opening, we have a collective performance called ‘Voicing Outside the Circle’. We have invited art and design students and tutors from art schools across Scotland to come to Dundee on the opening day and do a collective manifestoreading performance. Each person will have one minute to read, so from day one we’re channelling the power of these young students.


Would you consider this in itself an intervention into educational institutions and how they work?
Absolutely! We are using sit-ins, which have been used historically as tools of protest. I’m hoping that people working in academia can recognise what we stand for, and that it could perhaps inspire them.
Outside the Circle is also about the decolonisation of art education. Decolonisation is not just a box-ticking exercise. It’s embodied by me. I have lived experience understanding what that means. Outside the Circle is quite personal to me – I feel I’m always outside the circle.
I don’t expect artists to change the world, but artworks can definitely remind people to look at themselves in the mirror. We’re looking globally – for example we have another participatory installation in this exhibition initiated by Womanifesto. It’s about using the sewing process to create opportunities to listen to others. The piece created will be shipped to Thailand, and will be at the Sharjah Biennal [in the United Arab Emirates, February 2025]. Feminist internationalism is really embedded in the exhibition, which I’m really excited about.


What would you say to someone who is intimidated by the scope of the exhibition, and who may not know anything about these movements or thinkers?
I would say that you don’t have to be knowledgeable about the criticism – it is available of course for people to pick up and read – but we want to focus on gaining knowledge from the social situation. As far as knowledge goes – everyone has knowledge! What’s really important is feeling the energy in the exhibition.
Outside the Circle runs from 18 October 2024 till 1 February 2025 at Cooper Gallery DJCAD, 13 Perth Rd, DD1 4HT. More information on the exhibition can be found here.
Main Photo Credit: Sally Jubb