SENSORIA: Access & Agency
Issue 42:2 | Wirltuti / Spring 2022
This issue platforms a range of contemporary art practices and debates written by and with artists who identify as part of the disabled, d/Deaf, vision impaired or neurodiverse communities. The commissioned essays, profiles and conversations offer diverse perspectives of lived experience and (in)visibility in the art worlds of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the UK. Writers reflect on the power and politics of language, artist’s methods of working before and during the (2019–) pandemic, and the practical and social dimensions of access now and into the future. Read as a collection of art and ideas, SENSORIA: Access & Agency promotes nuanced ways of thinking about the binaries of ‘disability’ and ‘ableism’ in recent art history and current art discourse. It also explores experimental art making, writing and curating models to expand creative agency and generate authentic inclusion of physical and neurological diversity in the art world.
In this issue
All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, who will lead, who will define, refine, confine, design, who will dominate. – Octavia E. Butler. Some struggles are invisible simply because a single word is missing from public discussion. I find that this is particularly the case with words that carry life-giving concepts and that challenge social hierarchies. Their absence can give clues to who might be excluded and what is considered of less value within a given society. One such word is ‘neurodiversity’, and it is missing from exhibition records within some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading public art galleries.
In a sparse gallery space, a detached hydraulic door closer lies splayed on a white panel. This unassuming readymade by Belgian artist Steve Van den Bosch provides a subtle topographical deviation on the dull cement floor. Titled Assistant (2021), the closer was relocated from the gallery director’s office for the duration of Round About or Inside (30 September 2021 – 20 November 2021) at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. Appropriately placed on the ground—the anti-art/anti-functional gesture par excellence—the artwork suffices as a miniature monument to technologies of access, reflecting on how we move through spaces and what mechanisms exist to ensure our safe and comfortable journey, to welcome us, or to deny us entry.
