Jamming Day 1 | Queering the Classroom: Refusal, Love, and Disruption

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About Jamming Days
Tuned to the collaborative, experimental and improvisational ethos of musical ‘jamming’ and energised by the unruly possibilities of knowing otherwise, Jamming Days brings artists, curators, cultural workers, educators, students, activists, policymakers, and communities together in a series of discursive and participatory events. These charged moments of reflection, exchange and experimentation activate a constellation of (un)learning spaces, equipping individuals and communities to collectively inhabit, contest and transform this dissonant present with critical hope and solidarity that draws on knowledge in all its multiplicity. 

Part of Jamming The Ignorant Art School
Exhibition: 9 October – 12 December 2026

Biographies

Dr James Bell (he/him) is an artist and researcher specialising in queer and trans art, activism, culture, and social histories. James has a background in education and production in artist-led and contemporary arts organisations. He has working knowledge of and interests in arts education, exhibition making, access and equities, social justice, and social practice in contemporary art. Graduating with a BA (Hons) Time Based Art and an MFA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee (2011), James was a committee member of artist-led spaces Generator, Dundee (2011–12), and Rhubaba, Edinburgh (2013–15).

Gordon Douglas makes performances and games that attempt to exhaust the comedies and tragedies of our interdependent working lives. He is introduced with titles like ‘social resident’, ‘performative auditor’, ‘diplomat’s wife’ and other provisional roles, through which he repeatedly mistakes governance for choreography, rules for materials, and service for art. His work stages improbable collaborations, combining slapstick bureaucracy with taking administrative systems at their word. He is based between Glasgow and Beijing.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, solidarity, sisterhood and spirituality. She is director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative, that launched the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection (SAPC) in 2017 which represents 50 artists from the region at the Live Art Development Agency. She leads Asia-Art-Activism, a research network, and is the instigating council member of Asia Forum, a platform for gathering the practices and discourses of Global Asias. 

Johanna Linsley is an artist and researcher who works across performance, text, and sound. Her work is collaborative and often iterative, resulting in multiple outcomes or versions and she is interested in modes of assembly and collective imagination. For ten years, she collaborated with the late artist Rebecca Collins, using eavesdropping as an expanded creative method. Their book Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Arts and Performance was published by punctum books in 2026 and their album Stolen Voices001 was shortlisted for a New Music Scotland award in 2021. Johanna is a founder of I'm With You, a London-based performance collective, and a founding partner of UnionDocs, a centre for documentary arts in New York City. Her book Form and Formlessness in Contemporary Live Art is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

Nxa Parinussa is an interdisciplinary artist, arts producer, organiser and facilitator. They are interested in rethinking - renewing relationships, spaces and systems through connecting to all that we hold in our bodies, moving critically towards liberation through collective responsibility, care and reciprocity. 

Commissions have included 12 Hour Acting Up, Cooper Gallery (2025), The Centre of Somewhere residency, Johannesburg (2023), ember (5.5) at Jupiter Rising (2022), hologram (10.7) with Transplant Imaginaries/CBSS (2021) and sendiri for Take Me Somewhere (2021).   

Nxa centres embodied, values-based relational work in co-creating communities and workplaces informed by abolitionist, Transformative Justice frameworks. Since 2018 nxa has co-founded and organised grassroots initiatives focussed on cultural engagement, mutual aid and artist development with people of queer, trans and racialised experiences including BIPOC-led producing studio ID.Y CIC and House Ball Scotland, a QTBIPOC-led support project for Scottish underground ballroom culture. 

Jek McAllister is an artist, facilitator, gardener, and cook based in Dundee. Currently, she is Lead Artist for Alternative (Art) School, a project by Forgan Arts Centre supporting young people who feel excluded from mainstream education through a programme of art, craft and horticulture. Her day to day practice is and always has been concerned with creating fun circumstances for people to come together, hang out and experience or learn something (often around food). Jek has run Wooosh Gallery since 2019, was a Hospitalfield Graduate resident in 2023–24 and in 2025 facilitated 'Dundee Dye Gardens' as a part of the V&A Dundee exhibition Garden Futures. 

Edge School is a peer-to-peer learning programme for LGBTQIA+ at Forgan Arts Centre. 

Edge School takes its roots from the eighteenth-century Irish hedge schools; informal and often secret spaces of learning that emerged in response to legal and social oppression. Through creative practice and collective exploration, this programme creates space to experiment with what those futures might look like, and how they might be cultivated together. 

Forgan Arts Centre is a home for artistic production, experimentation, and learning in North East Fife. Edge School is funded by Fife Communities Mental Health Fund. 

Event Access

• Event will take place on level 2 of the gallery
• Light vegetarian and vegan food will be provided 
• non-alcoholic refreshments will be provided 
   

Access Funds

A small access fund is available to support travel and access for BSL interpretation, costs for childcare, carers & support workers and other needs. The funds are distributed on a first come first served basis. Please be aware we may need to close the fund early if demand is high, so please get in touch prior to event. 

For Travel

• please emailing stating where you are travelling from within Scotland 
• Cooper Gallery will book trains in advance for attendees and email ticket collection references

For all other access requests

• please email and detail your access requirement and request
• we will respond as soon as we can and confirm access fund transfer

Contact: [email protected]
 

General Access

Location

Cooper Gallery is located to the right side of the DJCAD buildings on Perth Road
Entrance is via double doors which face onto a car park
The gallery is on two levels

Level 1

• Ramped access
• Wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral
• Invigilator desk

Level 2

Lift route

• Accessible via lift, corridor and 5 steps. For wheelchair access via a stairclimber
• Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access

Step route

• 24 steps. Two flights of 12 steps with handrails are separated by a landing
• No toilet on first floor

Exhibition

• Exhibition videos are subtitled and captioned in English
• Seating is provided and/or additional seating available, please ask an invigilator
• Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides. If you require alternative formats for material in exhibitions please email or ask our Guides.

BSL & captioning

• For event requirements please email: [email protected]

Toilet

Ground floor has a wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral.

All Enquiries

• Please email: [email protected]
   

Funding support

The exhibition is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and with the kind support of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Centenary Trust.