Jamming The Ignorant Art School

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

Open 
Thursday – Saturday, 12–5pm
Or by appointment

Jamming The Ignorant Art School is an experimental exhibition and event project bringing together the ideas, tactics and strategies that have resonated most strongly with artists, contributors and participants across The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation (2021–2025), Cooper Gallery’s landmark five-year programme. 

Since 2021 The Ignorant Art School has critically and creatively challenged hegemonic modes of art pedagogy and knowledge production. Recasting the relationships between art and society, The Ignorant Art School offers radical imaginaries for a socially transformative art education resolutely oriented toward an emancipated future for all. 

Emerging from a period marked by unprecedented global social and political challenges and embracing the desires of The Ignorant Art School community established across Scotland, the UK, and beyond, Jamming the Ignorant Art School will be a tumultuous refrain and open-ended coda to the past five years of collective enquiry.

Transforming Cooper Gallery into an immersive ‘open classroom’, the exhibition Jamming the Ignorant Art School steadfastly refuses the redundant hierarchies that oppressively structure everyday life, cultural expression and knowledge under neoliberal capitalism. Choreographed by an all-encompassing blackboard the exhibition transforms the gallery into a singular time-space for deep engagement with the ideas and practices that have given The Ignorant Art School its critical rigour, revolutionary attitude and, above all, its emancipatory poise.

Featured artworks and Archives

Featured artworks by Sam Ainsley with Anne-Marie Copestake, Anne Bean, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Ruth Ewan, Tari Ito, Audre Lorde, Annabel Nicolson, The Otolith Group, Old Boys Network, Georgina Starr and Monica Ross alongside archival and ephemeral material of Edinburgh Arts, Haven for Artists, The Hackney Flashers, Gudskul, OutRage!, Rooftop Institute, The Hedgeschool Project, The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, The 1968 Hornsey Sit-in, and Womanifesto. 

Jamming Days

Tuned to the collaborative, experimental and improvisational ethos of musical ‘jamming’ and energised by the unruly possibilities of knowing otherwise, Jamming The Ignorant Art School brings artists, curators, cultural workers, educators, students, activists, policymakers, and communities together in a series of discursive and participatory events; Jamming Days. 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. 

Mapping an insurgent topography of ideas spanning Western and Global Majority perspectives, Jamming Days will offer intense moments of reflection, debate, experiment and action. Learning from Stuart Hall: What Do We See? What Do We Say? looks to methods of reading the contested present in order to build actions of hope; Learning from Counter-Futures: Practising Afrofuturisms explores Afrofuturisms as a form of radical pedagogy and opens up education as a politically charged practice for learning otherwise; Dundonian Dissent: Sowing Class activates Dundee’s feminist and working-class histories through voice, writing, collective action and remembrance; while Queering the Classroom: Refusal, Love, and Disruption summons feminist and queer practices of self-knowledge, intimacy and institutional disobedience. Moving between screening, listening, workshop, performance and deliberation, Jamming Days invites everyone not simply to encounter ideas, but to inhabit and contest them, then put them urgently to work.

Jamming The Ignorant Art School affirms that learning is an everyday act of resistance, a site of friction and possibility in which the emancipated futures we urgently need are ready to be imagined and enacted together.

Jamming Day 1
Queering the Classroom: Refusal, Love, and Disruption 
Saturday 24 October 2026, 12–5pm 
Participatory performance workshop, card game, listening and collective deliberations

Jamming Day 2
Learning from Stuart Hall: What Do We See? What Do We Say? 
Thursday 29 October 2026, 6–8.30pm 
Screening of John Akomfrah’s film The Stuart Hall Project (2013) introduced by Ranjana Thapalyal with a poetic response from Omar Kholeif

Jamming Day 3
Dundonian Dissent: Sowing Class 
Saturday 14 November 2026, 12–5pm 
Voice workshop, storytelling, seed sowing, Theatre of Oppressed exercise and collective deliberations conceived by Ruth Ewan and facilitated by special guests

Jamming Day 4
Learning from Counter-Futures: Practising Afrofuturisms
Saturday 28 November 2026, 12–5pm 
Readings, screening, sound intervention and collective deliberations led by The Otolith Group and facilitated by special guests