Event
The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in 5 | Grace Ndiritu
Grace Ndiritu: Compassionate Rebels in Action, an exhibition and season of events as part of The Ignorant Art School
Friday 10 October 2025 - Saturday 13 December 2025
Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design,
13 Perth Road,
Dundee,
DD1 4HT
Opening times
10 October – 13 December 2025
Tuesday – Saturday, 12–5pm
About the exhibition
Cooper Gallery’s critically lauded five-chapter exhibition and event project The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation culminates with Sit-in #5, Compassionate Rebels in Action staged by award winning British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) artist, filmmaker and writer Grace Ndiritu.
Deeply rooted in the transformative and celebratory power of activism and collective action, Grace Ndiritu for Sit-in #5 will centre practices of radical spirituality, pedagogy, social justice, and decolonisation as compassionate and holistic means to achieve new ways of ‘being together' in these unprecedented and unpredictable times.
Growing up in an activist household Ndiritu takes inspiration from her late mother, who founded a group called Women in The Third World with African and English friends. Involved in organising film screenings and talks, anti-apartheid and pro-multiculturalism protests, Ndiritu’s mother went on to study at the Truth and Reconciliation Centre in Birmingham in the 1980s. Drawing on the Ndiritu’s family history of anti-apartheid and feminist activism and her own sustained engagement with protest aesthetics and meditative practices, Compassionate Rebels in Action will mediate Cooper Gallery into a liminal space in which ‘we’, as a critical and radicalised plurality, can learn to meaningfully encounter and recognise each other in multiple moments of assembly.
Featuring a new mural installation incorporating a mirror and floor to ceiling images of historic protests that refract the viewer into the past and a transcendental not-yet, Ndiritu’s renowned Protest Carpets; WOMEN’S STRIKE (2021), LAND RIGHTS (2022), MOTHERHOOD (2022), APG (2022), LYC – CHILDREN PLAYING (2023), LYC – MAN DIGGING (2023), and LYC – WOMEN WEAVING (2023), and her film installation investigating alternative communities that she lived in, as well as those inspired by 1970s artists Li Yuan-chia (LYC), John Latham and Artists Placement Group (APG), Sit-in #5 invites a plethora of participation from deep seeing and close reading to collective learning of unlearning and revolutionary action.
Tracing Ndiritu’s creative and conceptual line of thought over two decades and illuminated by Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘politics of articulation’ that highlights a contingent process of creating meaning, Cooper Gallery has commissioned a new publication from Ndiritu, Glossary for Art and Action. Containing terms Ndiritu has invented or adopted since 2000 into her practice as artist and activist and redesigned as a subversion of the infamous Mao’s Little Red Book; the glossary engenders a humanitarian ethos of 'peace building', ethics of restitution and 'truth and reconciliation' for the art world and wider society. Providing a visual interpretation of Ndiritu’s Glossary for Art and Action, an ambitious new text installation will orientate the Study Room composed by the artist in collaboration with Cooper Gallery.
Grounded in an ‘ever present’ of historical yet still cogent acts of resistance, Compassionate Rebels in Action provides a choreographed ethical framework for a politicised togetherness. Evoking new worlds, challenging conventional spectatorship and modes of learning, the public event series Sit-in Curriculum #5: A Season of Peace Building, explores ecological activism, new economic tools, decolonial anti-racist strategies, and spiritual strategies for resistance. Foregrounding the necessity of a collaborative ethos and enthused by Ndiritu’s deep commitment to radical pedagogy and experimental education, Sit-in Curriculum #5 will equip individuals and communities with vital tools for fostering empathy and dialogue in a world suffering the rise of multiple fascisms.
Events
Sit-in Curriculum #5 | A Season of Peace Building
A Season of Peace Building is programmed for The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in Curriculum #5. This series of conversations, workshops and gatherings have been designed by Grace Ndiritu, drawing on her book Being Together: A Manual For Living as a template.
Events are open to all. Attend one or all. Full details at links below.
Living Together
Thursday 9 October (In-person)
Book Launch & In-conversation with Grace Ndiritu & Judith Wilkinson
Feeling Together
Thursday 16 October (In-person)
Workshop & In-conversation with Grace Ndiritu & Lama Rinchen Polma
Designing Together COVERSLUT©
Thursday 30 October (V&A Dundee)
Workshop facilitated by Rachel Siobhán Tyler
Sitting Together
Wednesday 5 November (Online)
Reading Group facilitated by Gareth Evans
Writing & Decolonising Together
Thursday 20 November (In-person)
Workshop facilitated by Titilayo Farukuoye
Growing & Eating Together
Thursday 4 December (In-person)
Gathering facilitated by Jek McAllister
Artist’s Biography
Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) visual artist, filmmaker and writer whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art Review, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, The Financial Times, Elephant, BOMB, Mousse, Art Monthly, Metropolis M, Phaidon: The 21st Century Art Book, Apollo Magazine 40 under 40 list, and BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour. She is a recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2024)
Her films and videos, textiles, photography, performances, paintings and architectural spaces have been widely exhibited, most recently, in her mid-career survey entitled Healing The Museum at S.M.A.K. Ghent in 2023. Upcoming solo exhibition at Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2025). Other recent solo exhibitions and projects include Page Not Found, The Hague (2025), Kate MacGarry, London (2023), Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2023) and Wellcome Collection, London (2023). Recent group shows include Lyon Biennale (2024), Kettles Yard (2023), Migros, Zurich (2023), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022), British Art Show (2021 - 2023), Coventry Biennial (2021), Nottingham Contemporary (2021).
Her writing has been published TATE, Migros Museum, Bergen Kunsthall, Whitechapel Gallery: Documents of Contemporary Art, The Paris Review, Le Journal Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Animal Shelter Journal Semiotext(e) MIT Press, Metropolis M art magazine and Oxford University Press.
Ndiritu is the winner of the Jarman Award in association with Film London (2022). Her award winning films have been screened at international film festivals like the 72nd Berlinale, FID Marseille and BFI London Film Festival.
Her work is also housed in museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Zurich), Foto Museum (Antwerp), The British Council, The Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw) and Arts Council England. As well as private collections such as the King Mohammed VI, Morocco and Walther Collection, New York and Germany.
Access
Cooper Gallery is located to the right side of the DJCAD buildings on Perth Road. The entrance is via double doors which face onto a car park.
The gallery is on two floors. Ground floor has ramped access. First floor is accessible by an internal lift and five steps with a handrail. Wheelchair access is via a stairclimber. Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access.
First floor is also accessible via 24 steps. Two flights of 12 steps with handrails are separated by a landing.
Exhibition videos are captioned in English. Audio will be played aloud via speakers. Seating is provided and/or additional seating available, please ask an invigilator.
For all enquiries please email: [email protected]
Toilets
The ground floor has a wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral.
Interpretation
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.
Image credit
Women’s Strike, New York City, 26 August 1970. Photo by Diana Davies 1970, annotated by Grace Ndiritu 2025.
Courtesy Diana Davies and the Sophia Smith Collection.
Funding support
The Ignorant Art School at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and with the kind support of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Centenary Trust.
Cooper Gallery
[email protected]