Grace Ndiritu: Compassionate Rebels in Action

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 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 (2023), 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 by 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.

Sit-in Curriculum #5: A Season of Peace Building
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, designed by Ndiritu, 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.

Living Together: October 9
Book launch & in-conversation with Grace Ndiritu & Judith Wilkinson 

Feeling Together: October 16 
Workshop & in-conversation with Grace Ndiritu & Lama Rinchen Polma 

Designing Together COVERSLUT©: October 30
Workshop facilitated by Rachel Siobhán Tyler

Sitting Together: November 5
Reading Group facilitated by Gareth Evans  

Writing Together & Decolonising Together: November 20
Workshop facilitated by Titilayo Farukuoye

Growing Together & Eating Together: December  4
Gathering facilitated by Jek McAllister

About The Ignorant Art School

Bringing together artists, activists, cultural workers designers, educators, students, writers, and various communities The Ignorant Art School questions what art education is and whom it serves. Enthused with revolutionary solidarity and organised as a collaborating collective The Ignorant Art School creatively re-imagine and co-constitutes radical blueprints for a socially transformative art education that opens towards an emancipated future.