This Saturday, University of Dundee’s Cooper Gallery revives the art-school tradition of end-of-term revels by taking over the city’s Botanic Garden for a day-long festival of performance, film, talks and more.
In a much greener setting than its regular Perth Road spaces, the gallery’s 12 Hour Sit-in Revel explores themes raised during its ongoing Ignorant Art School programme that has been examining the power of creative learning.
Music and ideas
Organisers have taken inspiration from the annual celebrations once put on by students at institutions such as Duncan of Jordanstone, featuring their own contributions and special guests – in 1968 Dundee’s art school booked a young Pink Floyd.
This weekend’s music includes a performance from ground-breaking Scottish-Indian fusionist and protest singer Kapil Seshasayee, while the evening closes with a global beats DJ set from Harun Morrison.
With a focus on ideas emerging from the southern hemisphere, Cooper Gallery director Sophia Hao has also invited members of the Indonesian collectives behind alternative art school Gudskul, whose ‘nongkrong’, or ‘hangout’, style of teaching is a key influence on the revel.
Events take place across the garden, including in a marquee and the site’s glasshouses, while its warehouse is being used as a cinema space.
Set among the greenery
Although performances and conversations are to be protected from the elements, Sophia explains it is important to hold the revel among greenery and foliage in honour of another educational pioneer: Rabindranath Tagore.
During the late 19th Century, this Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet founded a place of learning in West Bengal that combined education with ecological awareness.
His story is the theme of ‘O Horizon’, a sensual film by Turner Prize-nominated The Otolith Group, the duo comprising Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, due to be screened on Saturday.
Sophia invites people to come along and experience different ways of learning that she hopes will be enjoyable, but also empowering, quoting the manifesto of US author and activist bell hooks.
A community of possibility
“The Sit-in Revel will be a test ground for [her] vision of a classroom: a community as a location of possibility,” she says. “A place where ‘we have the opportunity to labour for freedom… to transgress’.”
Sophia has also commissioned two performance works by Scottish creatives responding to the garden setting.
Indian-born artist and writer Ranjana Thapalyal opens the revel with her piece entitled ‘Sound-Seed’, a collaboration with dancer and artist Hamshya Rajkumar.
The curator says this should encourage us to reflect on “the power of speech to inflict violence, as well to express love, induce dialogue or suggest the sublime”.
A special dish to complement
Later in the day, Glasgow-based artist Ashanti Harris, who originally studied sculpture, though now specialises in dance, brings ‘An Archive: The Rehearsal’ , a work partly inspired by her Caribbean heritage.
To continue the revel’s community ethos, the Gudskul team will help create a special dish with the Botanic Garden’s chef, Inda, who also happens to come from Indonesia, featuring ingredients grown in the garden and preceded by a traditional Indonesian ceremony.
- 12 Hour Sit-in Revel is on June 25 at Dundee Botanic Garden, 11am-11pm, free tickets from Eventbrite.
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