Third Text

18 September 2025

Anouk Hoogendoorn and Paul Alexander Stewart

From 8 October 2024 until 1 February 2025, the exhibition ‘The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #4: Outside the Circle’ was on view at Cooper Gallery in Dundee. ‘The Sit-in #4: 12 Hour Acting Up’ was the culminating event of the exhibition, from 11am until 11pm on 1 February

The Ignorant Art School  |  12 Hour Acting Up, 1 February 2025, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, photo by Ross Fraser McLean

Inside the 12 Hour Acting Up’s handout sits the picture of Audre Lorde, with a big smile, paddling on Krumme Lake in Berlin. She wears a red t-shirt with the quote ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution’. This line is sometimes (as is the case again now) attributed to Emma Goldman, but Goldman never wrote or said this exact phrase. Instead, it was paraphrased by printer Jack Frager, and it took on a life of its own. Most likely it came from the following situation that Goldman describes in her 1931 autobiography:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance... I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. ^[1]

The 12 Hour Acting Up is described as ‘a concrete manifestation of feminist and social activist bell hooks’s radical vision of a “field of possibility”’ and was part of ‘Outside the Circle: sit in #4’, ^[2] which brought together the contributors of the event within the exhibition display, sharing works by the likes of 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 Color Press, The Hackney Flashers, OutRage!, Womanifesto, Womanhouse and Women in Profile.

Both bell hooks and Audre Lorde, and with that the notions of possibility, power and joy, ran through this twelve-hour event. Curated with generosity by Sophia Yadong Hao, the Director of the Cooper Gallery, the event asked: What happens when we come together for a whole day? How does meeting change by the hour, by the colour of morning or evening, after and before lunch, resting or attentive? What is the pedagogy of coming together?  Hao, initiator of The Ignorant Art School, calls Audre Lorde her emotional strength and quotes her directly by stating that ‘survival is not an academic skill’. Hao calls for an acknowledgement that the master’s tools will never bring about systemic change and together we should build new ones.    

The sit-in brought up the notions of inside and outside, who has voice, and more specifically the need to decolonialise eurocentric narratives towards practices of unknowing. The exhibition itself was again framed through Lorde’s essay ‘The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. And it was indeed Lorde who tied together the entire event – from the image in the handouts, to the morning quotes, to seeing Lorde talk, dance, wander, giggle and speak in Dagmar Schultz’s 2012 film Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 To 1992 at the end of the day at 11pm. The entire day was a reminder of what it means to spend time together: each contribution was a gift to the room, as a proposition for building the tools of change.

‘From Within Outward’, collective dance led by Freedom Princess, 1 February 2025, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, photo by Sally Jubb

The Mistress of Ceremonies for the day, Freedom Princess, brought everyone together by beginning the morning with a collective dance. With a disco ball in hand, she turned her wrist. The seating for the event snaked through the exhibition furniture and everyone was seated neatly behind an archival display. On leaning in, one could read the photocopied chainletter of ‘snakes & ladders’ at Greenham Common in 1983. We were literally surrounded by art, archive and read-aloud manifestos that informed and fuelled this 12 Hour Acting Up. The first spoken word was grounding. Erin Farley placed us right where we were, in Dundee, with its industry and labour history. With ‘She Is A Problem Still’, Farley took us back to the early 1900s, through the words of songs written by the working women in Dundee. Farley held a bell in her right hand and reminded us of Mary Maloney, the Irish suffragette who followed Winston Churchill around with a bell during the Dundee by-election in 1908. Whenever Churchill tries to speak, his words are drowned in the ringing. The bell followed us, too, during the 12 Hour Acting Up. But here, it served as a call to order: to gather attention back to the programme and to wonder what it means to ‘act up’ together for twelve hours.

Collective gathering ran through the programme. Hao, at a later point in the day, gave us the well-considered suggestion that the exhibition space is the ‘rehearsal’. It is the practice of trying and doing together in preparation, and as the day landed and the talks flowed it became really legitimised in our engagement that this is a practice, a road test, even the intervals, in preparation for active thinking and doing. The multiple voices of Tako Taal’s coral reading of a script Taal calls ‘an essay with interruptions’; Amelia Jones’s keynote lecture that led us off the collective chuckle at the end of Susan Silton’s multilayered performance lecture ‘She Had A Laugh Like A Beefsteak’; a screening of Haven for Artists/Dayna Ash’s Courage (2020, Lebanon), which deconstructs the notion of courage and puts forward embracement of silence in relation to the multilayered identities of Arab queers, where we can read on screen: ‘To feed into myself the singular self’, ‘Your words cannot contain me’, ‘I’m versatile enough for you all to hate me’ and ‘Do I belong to the community if the silence is my confidant?’ We see lovers stroking each other’s skin, playing with each other’s hair. Afterwards, everyone is nourished by a delicious lunch catered by the restaurant across the street called ‘Beirut’.

‘To Whom Do I Owe The Woman I’ve Become?’, roundtable with Althea Greenan and Sabrina Henry chaired by Sophia Yadong Hao, 1 February 2025, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, photo by Sally Jubb

Lunch then led us into Sam Ainsley and Erica Eyres’s dialogue about female role models in art school education. Ainsley ended the conversation by understanding joy as a transgressive solidarity informed by Antonio Gramsci’s writing. On the treadmill of the ‘acting up’ we were then accelerated straight into Karen Di Franco’s analysis of ‘On Reading’, with works ‘not bound to be framed’, as her co-creator Annabel Nicolson said. The pace kept up and afterwards we moved into an in-conversation, again titled after Lorde: ‘To Whom Do I Owe the Woman I’ve Become?’ Althea Greenan began by sharing her extensive knowledge of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, London and the wider collections and archives. Greenan highlighted the work of Rita Keegan, who established the Women Artists of Colour Index. Here, it becomes clear that archive work is people work; it is an active knowledge exchange. Whether that is the performance of songs from Dundee workers through to the details of print and archive materials. There is hope in holding, hope in listening, power in retelling and in reminding that the struggle is real and its ongoing. The need for acting up is as present as ever and the call is to be relentless.

Sabrina Henry and Sylvia Wynter shared a personal story with institutions, and asked: Who feels at home? Who is inside and outside the circle? Is an alternative possible? This flowed into Dima Hamdan’s film Blood Like Water (2024, Palestine) like a chorographic holding where Hamdan poses the questions: Who is willing to collaborate with the enemy? Who is willing to resist while the occupying power is willing to use utmost violence? The audience enquired of Hamdan why not every spoken Arabic word was translated for the English subtitles. Hamdan remarked that ‘Sometimes the images, the gestures, the encounter of characters is what matters. Sometimes words are redundant.’

The fact that sometimes words are redundant rang in the air as the pace continued. Peter Tatchell gave a keynote expanding on the work of OutRage, a direct-action movement in the UK from 1990 to 2011. He stood in front of Derek Jarman’s painting Act Up (1992), adjacent to the OutRage archival footage. The pink and purple paint in the painting matches Tatchell’s purple shirt. The quick brushstrokes complement Tatchell’s call while he speaks of art and activism, of visual, theatrical, humoristic qualities and potentialities to raise public consciousness. He brings forward the challenge of equality and liberation: not to become part of the status quo but to be aware that the status quo is, in fact, unjust. He made a call for doing the undoable and saying the unsayable.

It is hard to talk of this event without really sharing the movement and speed of the back-to-back presentations and activities. It moved from one side of the room to the next and as Cornelia Sollfrank’s talk began on ‘Self-Organisation as an Aesthetic Practice’ she regrounded us through a feminist check-in: Where are we? Why are we here? What do we want to achieve? Sollfrank noted: ‘You can deal with power by thinking about how you deal with power within your own group. We don’t learn self-organisation or non-hierarchical gathering in traditional pedagogy. It is a practice we must learn together.’ Afterwards there was a collective listening to excerpts from Todo Bandhan (Break the Bind): Feminist Songs Compilation (1985) by Sheba Chhachhi. These songs, played before Shilpa T-Hyland’s workshop ‘Together We Breathe, Together We Move’, are the recording of the feminist protest songs from the Indian feminist street theatre production, Om Swaha, with Chhachhi’s narration. The sound piece (loaned from MoMA in New York) was also installed in the exhibition and reminds us how music flows across women’s differences and liberation movements.

Collective listening to Audre Lorde’s speech ‘Uses of the Erotic’ (1978), 1 February 2025, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, photo by Ross Fraser McLean

In the speed and energy, it was really apparent that we were not there to just be hosted but to be prepared and to gather tools and tactics in preparation for a deeper level of thinking and working together. The ongoing call back to Lorde as the whole of her speech ‘Uses Of The Erotic’ (1978) was played to the room, called in to relation the senses and the practice of resistance, where being in touch with that means to refuse powerlessness: ‘And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.’ ^[3]

Throughout the day people were invited to be part of the programme that spilled out of the main room, through the study area, the relocated ‘Unlearning Circle’, a collective sewing ‘WeMend’ initiated by Womanifesto… and you could have your portrait taken by Phyllis Christopher and Ajamu X. It was with this session, titled ‘Darkroom/Studio Intimacies: A Photographic Encounter With Phyllis Christopher and Ajamu X’, that the power of the event and the work of Hao in pulling this show together really came to the fore, chaired with skill by Laura Guy. Everything that had moved throughout the day seemed to mix in their well-informed and truthful words. Words of photographic pedagogy, of sensuous encounters with others and the visceral liquids of the darkroom. Here, the notion of practice met the notion of process, as a way of working, thinking and making sense of the world through all our senses. This is exactly the capacity of the darkroom, where the encounter becomes material. Ajamu X spoke of subverting the mugshot of the black body, and how that is why he consciously doesn’t let the subject of colour look directly into the camera. Either Christopher or Ajamu X, or maybe both, noted that ‘every moment is an encounter with the archive’, which means to rethink the cold and clinical concept of an archive. It is, rather, physical, it is alive, it is actively doing something to us. That is what we were reminded of once again, surrounded by paintings, news clippings, audio, video and manifestos – a rehearsal for a refusal to settle.
 

^[1]    Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Knopf, New York, 1934 [1931], p 56

^[2]    ‘Sit-in #3’ was written about for Third Text Online by Ranjana Thapalyal in February 2024; see Pedagogies of Transmission in ‘ ...But There Are New Suns’: The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #3 with The Otolith Group

^[3]    Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Penguin Modern #23, Penguin Random House UK, 2018, p 13

Anouk Hoogendoorn (they/them) is an artistic researcher working with text, textile and performance. They are currently a PhD candidate at Teesside University and Zurich University of the Arts.

Dr Paul Alexander Stewart is an artist and a curator. He is Associate Professor of Curating and Art at Teesside University and convenor of the MA Curating Degree Apprenticeship.