Third Text

14 February 2024
 

Ranjana Thapalyal

‘ ...But There Are New Suns’: The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #3, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, Scotland, 12 October – 16 December 2023

‘…But There Are New Suns’, curated by Sophia Yadong Hao, was the first major exhibition in Scotland for Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun – the Otolith Group. This review navigates some of the artistic, literary and political sources that permeated the show, in relation to its partnership with the wider aspirations of the equally complex Ignorant Art School, an ongoing five-part project of the Cooper Gallery, Dundee. The Otolith Group’s interest in ‘curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms’ ^[1] and the ways in which it has been energised by the collaboration with The Ignorant Art School is a recurring theme. The title ‘…But there Are New Suns’ is drawn from Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable of the Trickster, which was to follow her Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In full it reads: ‘there’s nothing new under the sun… but there are new suns’. ^[2] There is a world-weariness to the phrase; everything has been tried before, yet the world has failed, but the existence of ‘new suns’ implies we can move to new orbits. There may be new forms of thinking and being that might yet save us, and in this possibility lies the productive resonance that was on display in ‘…But there Are New Suns’. Injected with the vitality of thinking around collective, self-empowering pedagogy that forms the bedrock of the Ignorant Art School, the exhibition created an ideal environment for the artists’ longstanding interest in ‘articulating the idea of the otolith with the idea of the group [engendering] a supernumerary form of life’. ^[3]
 

Afrofuturism and the Uncanny Present

Butler’s science fiction and the uncanniness of her stories have long had a presence in the work of the Otolith Group and the discourse around it. Where their visions overlap, there emerges in the Otolith Group’s films a performative ‘afrofuturism [that] unravels any linear model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession of technological time (emphasis original), in which past and future are subject to ceaseless de- and recomposition’. ^[4]  This is a futurism that does not succumb to the erasure of black history and contemporaneity, the characteristic trait of ‘Euro-American Science Fictional visions of the future… “a world without war, hurt or hunger (also tactless enough, without black folks)”’. ^[5]  Mark Fisher’s reflection on metaphysical openings, or fuller reality in music that acknowledges its artificial recorded nature (the literal and metaphorical ‘crackle’ of sonic hauntology), describes dub as ‘the Afrofuturist science par excellence’. ^[6]  He argues that ‘the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of Capital’ ^[7] makes Afrodiasporic experience quintessentially hauntological; that while Derrida’s articulation of theoretical hauntology may have startled some in the academy, ^[8] it was already lived by peoples whose ancestral lives had been violently displaced into a future reliant on disjuncture with their histories, while their embodied reality, perhaps for that very reason, remained expectant with that past.

The Otolith Group, INFINITY minus Infinity, 2019, screening view as part of the event ‘L’École du soir Cinéma #4’, with live response The Re-Action of Black Performance, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023; photo courtesy of Cooper Gallery

Eshun was already using the language of science fiction to complicate its possibilities when he wrote, ‘the idea of slavery itself as an alien abduction… means that we’ve all been living in an alien-nation since the 18th century’. ^[9]  To refuse either the covering over of this experience, or the externally formed pressure to enact an overcoming of it, seems to synopsise the methodology of the Otolith Group. Theirs is a language of densely constituted present, where past and future coexist in an acutely relational bond, textured by informing critical lenses. The inter-porosity of these areas of thought is central to their practice, and reflected in their name. The two-part otolith organ is located in the inner ear, enabling us to locate ourselves in gravitational balance. As a moniker, it also alludes to the functionality of the calcium carbonate-based crystals of the otoliths as permeable boundaries, intermediaries between internal and external space.
 

The Black Box and the Ignorant Art School

Transmissions of a range of intellectual terrains emanate from this exhibition, rather like the sensory tentacles of the Oankali, Butler’s enigmatic, alien would-be rescuers of humanity in her Xenogenesis trilogy, seducing audiences into ever-expanding areas of thought. In the wall text written for ‘…But there Are New Suns’, the artists cite The Black Insider by Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marесhеrа (who also used the otolith as metaphor) stating ‘When Marechera points to the otoliths’ capacity for impulse transmission, what he highlights is its ability to enable auditory transmission across, within and between the three planes of space of a body’s movement.’ ^[10]  For Eshun and Sagar, this idea becomes syntax for visuality, textuality and art production, and also formulates for them ‘an allegory [in which] the morphological figure of the otolith operates as a kind of black box for withholding intention, gauging impact, measuring expectation and calculating discrepancy’. ^[11] That the first of these listed purposes is about refusal to provide explanation is significant. As with Afrofuturism’s resistance to disappearance of African history in Eurocentric Futurism, they remain alert to the impact of ‘traps solicited as invitations’, ^[12] which can be read as a reference to inclusion schemes that homogenise and ultimately depoliticise grassroots movements.

Here the specific context of the Dundee show is important. ‘…But there Are New Suns’ was the third iteration of ‘The Ignorant Art School – Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation’, an ongoing series of exhibitions creating many forms of artistic, pedagogical and theoretical encounters. Conceived by Hao as a means of ‘[r]epurposing equality as a practice rather than an ideal, The Ignorant Art School examines the histories and future possibilities of art education’. ^[13]  It is an intensely collaborative undertaking, organised as an organic collective, utilising both digital and physical spaces and engendering dialogue between individuals and organisations that may otherwise not have met, building up volumes of valuable archives and new visual, sonic and literary work. The title for the Otolith Group’s exhibition, ‘…But There Are New Suns’, with its cautious optimism, was suggested by Hao because it ‘speculates on possible futures for knowledge through the prism of the generative and collaborative ethos of Afrofuturism and envisions a future of empowered communities sharing in solidarity and Otherness’. ^[14]

The synergy between Hao’s trademark interdisciplinary social critique as curatorial complexity, ^[15] the propositions of The Ignorant Art School and the methods of the Otolith Group was evident in this challenging and visually impactful exhibition. All three levels of the gallery, their walls absorbed in an ocean of night-blue darkness, became one whole navigational space from which two continuously screened films beckoned. The large stairwell, often used for projection, was rendered enigmatic with an animated projection of the sigil that appears in all the Otolith Group films, its deep yellow circle and three lines helping eyes to adjust in the dim light. At the top of the stairs, on a small suspended screen was another cleverly extracted film sequence titled OwLoop (DoomLoop): a white barn owl staring directly at us, then flying imperiously away into the distance, disappearing into blackness. In the main gallery space upstairs three large appliqué panels by Rhona Jack served as both sound panels and surfaces on which the sigil once again held ground, with a subtle change from yellow to muted blue lines. These images will dwell long in the mind, as will the legacy of ideas that emerged from the accompanying events and dialogue that were integral to the show.

The Otolith Group, foreground: OwLoop (DoomLoop), 2022, HD video, colour, projection screen, 1 min 33 sec; background: Otolith Sigil, 2023, looped animation, dimensions variable; installation view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023, photo by Sally Jubb

Themes of The Ignorant Art School and the Otolith Group’s ‘Department of Xenogenesis’

Dynamically shifting content is central to the philosophy and methodology of The Ignorant Art School. It has, thus far, presented three unique temporal environments of interaction and dialogue, implicit ‘Sit-ins’ of the Cooper Gallery as an institutional space, literally and metaphorically occupying the cultural terrain of the University of Dundee. Each Sit-in has invited criticality on pedagogy and creative hierarchies, commissioning new artworks and generating debate that may be missing, or that strengthens the tenacity of existent divergent thinking. Each Sit-in was also associated with a theme, with Hao and her team putting together a series of public events described as the Sit-in Curriculum. Sit-in #1 (3 September – 23 October 2021) featured a solo show by Ruth Ewan titled ‘We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be and It’s Not Too Late to Change’. It included a new work, How Many Flowers Make the Spring?, incorporating oral histories of public protests, and Ewan’s 2011 timepiece modelling the decimal division of the day and the secularised calendar of the 1798 French Revolution. The Curriculum picked up on these themes of people’s movements while underlining Dundee’s reputation for radical working class organisation. ^[16]  Sit-in #2 (3 December 2021 – 19 February 2022) presented ‘To Be Potential’, an exploration of the emancipatory potential of artistic practice as pedagogy, with case studies from the Global South and the Global North, and with Jade Montserrat as a critical friend and contributor. Most recently, Sit-in #3, to which this review pertains, comprised the exhibition and public programme of ‘…But There Are New Suns’ by the Otolith Group (12 October – 16 December 2023). It featured two films, What the Owl Knows (2022) co-produced by Cooper Gallery, and O Horizon (2018). ^[17]

The Otolith Group, O Horizon, 2018, 4K video transferred to HD, 16:9, colour, sound, projection screen, cork, rubber, seating, 81 min 10 sec; installation view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023, photo by Sally Jubb

Following the reciprocal production paradigm of the ever-morphing Ignorant Art School, the Curriculum of Sit-in #3 was created in collaboration with ‘The Department of Xenogenesis’, or DXG, the pedagogical strand of the Otolith Group’s curatorial practice, ^[18] but distinct as an iteration within The Ignorant Art School. As Hao explains, The Ignorant Art School has longterm ambitions:

One of the key aspirations of the Ignorant Art School is to cultivate the ground for an emancipated future of many futures and ask questions such as how do we inscribe this potential tomorrow in our troubled present? What do we need to learn to bring this possibility into now, or is it that we must first unlearn in order to take a step forward? … a gallery in an art school is frequented by artists, designers, researchers and theorists from such a broad spectrum of practices and disciplines; yet these classifications, this nomenclature is none the less insufficient in capturing the actual diversity of opinion and thinking that characterise not just this but any art school. ^[19]

The five chapters of The Ignorant Art school, of which ‘…But There Are New Suns’ was the the third, are aimed at ushering in a different kind of environment.

The art school in keeping with this project is instead a heterogeneous gathering, a co-constitution of Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’, thick with desires, expectations and needs which resist being articulated by or subordinated within any reductive and thus repressive taxonomy.^[20] 

This entangles well with the Otolith Group’s research ethos:

DXG is an experiment with pedagogy that emerges from and extends the research practice of The Otolith Group. DXG treats science fiction as a narrative vehicle that enables an imagination of scale which allows thought to gain traction upon the denaturalisation of the human, the extinctions of the earth, the necropolitics of technofascisms and the entanglements of global blackness and decolonization. ^[21]

Sit-in #3 touched, therefore, on some of these concerns in its programming, with Sagar and Eshun co-curating and participating in the five Curriculum public events: ‘Thinking the Otolith Sigil’, ‘Thinking Futurisms Critically’, ‘Thinking Hydropoetics Critically’, ‘Thinking “The Idea of Black Culture” Critically’ and ‘Thinking with Improvisation Critically’. A sixth session on Butler was postponed, but the rest created challenging immersions in themes evoked by Otolith Group works, with critical, historical and/or creative contextualisation by invited artists and theorists. Other shorter Otolith Group films not included in the main show were also screened, paired with discussant artists and writers and tabled as ‘L’Ecole du Soir Cinema’. These included Otolith II (2007), with a response by Rae-Yen Song, In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013) with Anne-Marie Copestake, INFINITY minus Infinity (2019) with Ashanti Harris and Sabrina Henry, and I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point And Another (2012) with Daisy Lafarge.

The Otolith Group, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, 2012, screening view as part of the event ‘L’École du soir Cinéma #2’, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023; photo courtesy of Cooper Gallery


Pedagogy in the ‘Politics of Time’ and ‘L’Ecole de Soir Cinema’

It would be impossible not to note that the dates of ‘ ...But There Are New Suns’ meant that a shadow hung over it in the form of the unfolding war on Gaza. In viewing a film as luxuriously embedded with meaning as I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point And Another, this incidental timeline became even more poignant. On a wet, windy and cold Dundee night, the perceptibly shaken public and staff that filed in to the gallery seemed to be lost in the numbing news of the massive sustained bombardment of occupied Gaza sparked by the events of 7 October, and the realisation that it was unlikely to stop any time soon. The seemingly simple construction of the film filled the senses, with its multiple doorways inside the apartment of Etel Adnan, interspersed with infinitely expanding natural forms of clouds, plants, water. Connecting all this, the quietly powerful voice of the Lebanese American artist and poet, reading from the timeless meditations in her book Sea and Fog (2012). Yet the film also seemed to open a space of grief and bewilderment at the witnessing of real-time catastrophe, searingly present in the living rooms of our consciousness. Responsibility and the irony of our own safety while our leaders fund the killing of others sat uneasily alongside the welcome news that ‘L’Ecole du Soir Cinema’ screenings would raise funds for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Although Daisy Lafarge was unable to attend, she had sent extracts from Adnan’s novel Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and an essay by the Palestinian American poet George Abraham, ‘Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse’, that she had planned to present. At Hao’s suggestion, these were instead read aloud collectively by the audience in spontaneously sequenced voices, with many noting the implications of Abraham’s text from 2021 being completely applicable today, as if set on hideous repeat.

The programme of additional screenings was an evocation of Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène, who:

… saw cinema as cours du soir or ‘evening classes,’ informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality and conviviality within the realm of art learning and making in his region. He viewed cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience and public dissemination. ^[22]

The allusion to Sembène, in borrowing his title for the exhibition’s evening screening sessions, served a pedagogic purpose, pointing exhibition goers to his thought and cinematic works. And especially for those who would delve further, it also enriches speculation on art’s possibilities as a conduit for intergenerational and intercultural social histories. To become aware of Sembène’s films is to also encounter African colonial histories and the indigenous voices that critiqued it, to witness the morphing of cultures in the diaspora and on the continent, not least in the existence of francophone, anglophone and Portuguese cinema and literature. In this vein, apart from bringing together and facilitating exchange between a well-thought-through array of intellectual and creative contemporary voices, a hallmark of The Ignorant Art School is its generous provision of historical, academic and broader social context for the works on display, the inspirations they draw from, and in some cases the ideas the exhibition has generated for the artists and writers who present the curriculum for each Sit-in. This material is housed in a room adjacent to the main gallery space, with seating and a welcoming atmosphere for study and contemplation. This formula not only justifies the overall experience as an in-depth encounter with art and ideas, but also as a dedicated pedagogic environment in the best active learning sense. In the case of ‘…But There Are New Suns’ it seems very much in keeping with the functioning of Otolith Group projects over the years. Their cinematic abstractions and cryptically layered texts, and their non-linear story-opening rather than straightforward story-telling methods, also serve to deposit awareness of bodies of knowledge, history, contemporaneity and individual thought not widely available, or that was, and is, actively evaded in the standard schooling in the UK they grew up in.

The stated ambition of ‘…But There Are New Suns’ was to approach ‘the politics of time through its engagement with the poetics of temporal reconfiguration’. ^[23]  It could be argued that every new batch of students, every seminar group, every classroom setting is also a ‘temporal reconfiguration’ with different minds temporarily coming together, albeit regularly, at times for several years. But this is not generally noted by art education establishments. An institution-bound curriculum is premised on the need of each designated group being exposed to the same material in discernible order, generally structured hierarchically. Even if art schools invite students to do what they will with the curriculum presented, it cannot be said that the pedagogic intent is to engage with temporality in a conscious way. Furthermore, the material to which students are exposed can be constrained by the tastes and selections of lecturers and invited artists. Often, as Hao points out, these selections do not speak for the diverse and divergent range of outlooks and experience in student and staff cohorts. This situation has been extensively critiqued from feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and many other perspectives, and there have been calls for expanding the curricular fare and representation in staffing. ^[24]  For The Ignorant Art School, the emphasis lies in creating networks of learning and exchange that then generate new strands and which continue to evolve long after the exhibitions that set them off have ceased physically to exist.

The Otolith Group, ‘…But There Are New Suns’, 2023, exhibition study area featuring references for further reading selected by the Otolith Group and Cooper Gallery, blackboards, prints, books, articles, tv monitors; installation view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023, photo by Sally Jubb

Theorising and Enacting Collective Action

A perfect example of a seed event that could instigate just such a chain was the DXG discussion sited around a reading of Hortense Spiller’s 2006 essay ‘The Idea of Black Culture’. ^[25]  The event was led by Sagar, Eshun and the academic Gus John, well known for his work in British education and social policy, and an activist from the 1960s to the present day. Crucially, the session provided firsthand experienced insight into important history that tends today to only be read as theory. John’s statement ‘we must have a fundamental belief in the power of collective action to bring about change’, ^[26] his reflections on the anti-racist work of his generation, alongside his thoughts on contemporary possibilities brought home the importance of grassroots organisation. John also underlined the inescapable need to ‘dissect capitalism’ in order to grasp one’s position and the potential to change it. He spoke of ‘the indices of betrayal [that could] be itemised’ and the central dilemma faced by first-generation migrants from the Caribbean:

The question then is this – if that is the reality of people’s existence, what do we actually do about it? It’s not enough for an individual to say ‘I didn’t expect that of Britain’ because to not have expected it of Britain means that your minds were totally colonised and you were not in the frame to ask yourselves why are these things happening in the country that I left before coming here? Why was it that so many people were left penniless when Britian left on the day or night of independence?’ ^[27]

When these connections were seen it was evident what needed to be done, since it was not going to be done for them by the British state:

I believe that we need to understand how in those early days we organised ourselves against that rabid racism and all the oppression that it signifies. And we did, we built our institutions, we took to the streets, we drove away the fascists that wanted to walk through our communities sowing hate with impunity under the watchful eye of the police. We had to physically drive them away. ^[28]

In the course of this discussion, and elsewhere, Sagar expressed her concerns about the silencing of genuine debate and action on these issues in today’s political climate, one in which a plethora of anti-discrimination legislation exists, yet seems to have a fracturing effect on the power that a collective voice can obtain:

I really sense we have to come together again in the same way that we did in the 60s… because I have the terrible sense that the very idea of decolonising, the very idea of naming racism and naming the exploitation and violence and brutality that has only become worse… not only in the UK but globally… various different institutions… want to silence it. ^[29]

Sagar also suggests that this silencing can take many forms, including ostensibly supportive ones:

… the very critique of colonialism now [is] just using the idea of trauma to engage people. And trauma comes to us in parts. Trauma comes in parts from this event from that event in history but it doesn’t tell history you know… We have to actually think about history over trauma right now… so we need to keep strategising. ^[30]

This reinforces John’s earlier words about building tools for scrutinising one’s context, collective action and the applicability of these actions today: ‘so my point is… it was a story for us then, it is a recipe for a current generation and those to come’. ^[31]  The conversation brings to mind Paolo Freire’s concept of ‘conscientisation’, ^[32] the pedagogic empowering of an oppressed population by providing critical thinking tools for analysing their position, thereby enabling movement beyond it, and the creation of not a simple reversal of power dynamics but a newness that liberates all and ends repetitive cycles of exploitation.

Indeed, there were so many chords struck by ‘…But There Are New Suns’ that there is insufficient space to mention them all here. There is much, for example, to investigate in Hannah Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’, ^[33] the evocative idea that it is only when a community makes itself visible to itself and to others, when it senses its own collective nature, that it acquires the power of action. And there is cause for hesitation, too. In the Afrofuturist and global majority anti-racist contexts of ‘…But There Are New Suns’, and of The Ignorant Art School, it is difficult not to consider Arendt’s limitations. Her location of ‘the seeds of European fascism in the racism of imperial expansion’ alongside ‘deep racial prejudices, especially when writing about people of African descent’, ^[34] are, of course, problematic. These become most apparent in her writing on the civil rights movement in the US, but are already present in her ‘haste in passing over specificities of the question of racism’, a trait, argues Paul Gilroy, she shared with Agamben. ^[35]  One of the most valuable outcomes of The Ignorant Art School, however, is the fact that all these important questions manifest, invite critical inquiry and can instigate methodologies for discerning the valuable aspects of a relevant theory while remaining alert to its inadequacies and harmful positions.

The Otolith Group, What the Owl Knows, 2022, HD video, colour, projection screen, seating, 55 min 7 sec; installation view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023, photo by Sally Jubb

That such possibilities occur alongside the dissemination of absorbing and original artworks is equally significant, as is the sharing of platforms. The two films, O Horizon, about Rabindranath Tagore’s experimental art school Shantiniketan, and What the Owl Knows, centred around the painting process of Lynette Yiadom-Boake, each employ the Otolith Group’s favoured video essay format slightly differently. They also open very different avenues of political and aesthetic engagement. It could have been rewarding to include more of the context of O Horizon in the Curriculum; any note of artists associated with Shantiniketan, Tagore’s philosophy and the foregrounding of art and culture as revolutionary practices in the Indian independence movement in which he was such an emblematic figure, seemed absent. However, whether explicit or not the connections are there to be made, and perhaps it is up to the viewer to take that into new work and thought. Looking back at a thought-provoking, autumn-long series of rich visuals, in-depth research and startling interventions, there is a sense that new threads are on the move. Suffice to end, then, with flashes from films and performances of Sit-in #3:

Yiadom-Boake’s lounging protagonists emerge steadily, scratchily, from abstract brush strokes, as a disgruntled pigeon remains sceptical of the owl saving flight for night; Tagore’s question ‘today, in one hundred years, who are you sitting reading this poem of mine?’ gains response in the painted circle replicating Shantiniketan’s outdoor classroom in a gallery hundreds of miles away; Ashanti Harris, Sabrina Henry, Mele Broomes and Plantainchipps weave sound, voice and movement into an improvised chant, ‘blackness has the capacity to disclose another horizon’; Shiori Usui fills the space with delicate stringed vibrations and staccato vocal articulations; Maria Chávez magically transforms her DJ deck into echoes of nature; Loré Lixenberg, fluent in the language of birds arrives with a flourish of squawks so piercing a viewer seems to jump three feet back, but we are soon conversing gamely in bird song; Elaine Mitchener turns Eshun’s wall text back on itself, reading the entire piece in an improvised exploration of speech. ^[36]

You get the feeling a lot of people can know what the owl knows….

Shiori Usui's live improvisation as part of the event ‘DXG #6: Thinking with Improvisation Critically’, 2023; performance view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, photo by Ross Fraser McLean


The Otolith Group, OwLoop (DoomLoop), 2022, HD video, colour, projection screen, 1 min 33 sec; installation view, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023, photo by Sally Jubb

^[1]     See the Otolith Group website

^[2]     See Gerry Canavan, ‘“There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns”: Recovering Octavia E Butler’s Lost Parables’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 June 2014, accessed 9 August 2023

^[3]     From the wall text in the study area of the ‘…But There Are New Suns’ exhibition, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, 2023

^[4]     Mark Fisher, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult, vol 5, no 2, 2013, Special Issue on Afrofuturism, pp 42–55, p 47

^[5]     Ibid, p 47, quoting Mark Sinker

^[6]     Ibid, p 44

^[7]     Ibid, p 46

^[8]     See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, New York, 1994

^[9]     Kodwo Eshun, quoted by Mark Fisher in, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle’, op cit, p 46

^[10]    From the wall text in ‘…But There Are New Suns’

^[11]    Ibid

^[12]    Ibid

^[13]    See The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation, 25 February 2021 – 31 December 2025, accessed 17 December 2023

^[14]    Sophia Yadong Hao, Director and Principal Curator, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee – extract from an invitation to the Otolith Group to show at Cooper Gallery, personal communication, 2023

^[15]    Among many examples, see Sophia Hao, ed, Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event?, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019, publication accompanying a Cooper Gallery exhibition in 2016–2017 of women artists collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘foregrounding praxis of resistance, collectively, and self-organization’  

^[16]    Sit-in #1 included research into Dundee’s working class history and a variety of responses to it; the Curriculum launched with ‘An A–Z of Dundonian Dissent’ presented online due to the pandemic, by Ruth Ewan, Erin Farley and historian Siobhan Tolland

^[17]    See The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #3 | The Otolith Group, ...But There Are New Suns, 13 October–16 December 2023, accessed 4 January 2024

^[18]    See The Otolith Group: Department of Xenogenesis, accessed 4 January 2024

^[19]    Sophia Yadong Hao, personal communication, 4 January 2024

^[20]    Ibid

^[21]    See The Ignorant Art School Sit-in Curriculum #3, accessed 4 January 2024

^[22]    Christian Nyampeta, 2019, from the École du soir/The Evening School website, accessed 4 January 2024

^[23]    See The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #3 | The Otolith Group

^[24]    The critiques of Homi Bhabha, Rachael Mason, Griselda Pollock, Eddie Chambers, Rasheed Araeen, Dennis Atkinson, Gus John, Paul Dash, and more recently Sarah Ahmed, Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, amongst many others, demonstrate the currency of these debates over many decades

^[25]    See Hortense Spiller, ‘The Idea of Black Culture’, New Centennial Review, vol 6 no 3, 2006

^[26]    From a video recording of ‘Thinking “The Idea of Black Culture” Critically’, 30 November 2023, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee

^[27]    Ibid

^[28]    Ibid

^[29]    Ibid

^[30]    Ibid

^[31]    Ibid

^[32]    See Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, M Bergman Ramos, trans, Penguin Books, London, 1996

^[33]    See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998

^[34]    See Patricia Owens, ‘Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and “the One Great Crime in which America was Never Involved”’ (Version 1), University of Sussex, 2017, p 1, accessed 13 January 2023

^[35]    See Paul Gilroy, ‘Race and the Right to be Human’, inaugural lecture delivered on 3 December 2009 in acceptance of the Treaty of Utrecht Chair at Utrecht University, downloadable PDF, p 20, accessed 13 January 2023

^[36]    In order of mention, the works and events referred to are: Otolith Group films What the Owl Knows (2022) and 0 Horizon (2018); DXB Curriculum event ‘The Re-Action of Black Performance’ which was a response to Infinity Minus Infinity (2019) presented by Sabrina Henry and Ashanti Harris with Mele Broomes, Plantainchipps, Saoirse Amira Anis and Marios Ento-Engkol, and DXB Curriculum event 'Thinking with Improvisation Critically', Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, December 2023

Ranjana Thapalyal is an interdisciplinary artist and academic based in Scotland. Publications include her research in intercultural pedagogy for higher education, Education as Mutual Translation, a Yoruba and Ancient Indian Interface for Pedagogy in the Creative Arts, published by Brill in 2018. Recent critical writing has featured in Art Monthly, MAP, Nowness Asia, Panel and Mrin. She lectured for many years at Glasgow School of Art and now works freelance.