The School Of The Damned Degree show

8 FEB 2014 NIGHT OF THE DAMNED 7:30 pm £5

The grand finale to the school of the damned's degree show. An informal evening of live happenings, including graduation ritual, music on the Hurdy Gurdy, a live comic reading and performance art. Guests can also try thier luck at the SOTD hook game and enjoy a pint of cask ale.

EXHIBITION: Sat 18th Jan – Sat 8 Feb, Mon – Sat, 12 – 6pm

The School of the Damned is an unaccredited underground MFA course which operates out of the Horse Hospital once a month. The inaugural year of its program culminates in this end of year show, in which graduating students will exhibit their work and reflect upon a year of discourse, making and protest against their exclusion from accredited, fee paying education.

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School of the Damned is an MA course run by its students and overseen by a board of academic advisors. It is intended to provide artists who cannot afford to study on an accredited program with a critical discourse and rigorous re-assessment of their art practices. The course also aims to establish a new network of artists, academics and institutions, which would not only advocate free education, but demand a universal acknowledgment of education as a fundamental right. Further to this aim, by its existence the course acts as a form of protest against an plutocratic state, which preserves aristocracies, promotes rampant avarice and marginalises the poor, dismantling their institutions and restricting their access to learning. By deeming itself a Masters Degree in Art, the course demands of itself a constant assessment of its proposed equivalence to established/accredited courses, yet ultimately understands that it will fail in this goal. The School of the Damned operates outside of the officially sanctioned academic institution, but does this out of necessity because the current system increasingly restricts access to such institutions. This course has been conceived of and produced as a pragmatic response to this current system, therefore, and as a protest against it, should not be construed as advocating or condoning an independent system of education based on values of entrepreneurism, philanthropy, libertarianism or self-reliance.

Students: Jack Barraclough, Kitty Clark, Rachael Haines, Andy Healy, Joseph Lewis, Matilda Moors, Jennifer Pengilly, Sara Nunes Fernandes, Clare Rees-Hales, Rosie Ridgway, Stefan Sadler, David Steans, Liam Wright-Higgins.