Corban Walker, Short Minute Matter, 2015, Atelier Calder Residency, France.
Amanda Cachia: Contemporary Disability Art: Access Aesthetics and Institutional Critique
Online lecture
Thursday, 13 July 2023, 6 pm
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The title and subject of this talk are based on Amanda Cachia’s new monograph, currently under review with the University of Minnesota Press. The lecture illustrates how contemporary disabled artists are moving away from representations of disability, instead creating an art of access, or access aesthetics, through artworks that centre translation, sensory expansion, touch, and movement for audiences that offer an experience of “being with” disability.
By making inequities in the museum more transparent, artists also engage in institutional critique, demanding agency, voice, empowerment, and social justice. The institutional critique work by contemporary disabled artists who deploy variable disability topoi, including deafness, blindness, dwarfism, mobility, and autism, make audiences more sensitive to ways in which bodies take in information and process stimuli.
On a broader level, contemporary disability art extends and repurposes art historical precedents in directions that compel us to regard the artistic past differently.
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Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, writer, and art historian specialising in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the incoming Assistant Professor and Assistant Program Director of Arts Leadership at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she will also serve the Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management and the Certificate in Arts and Health. Cachia is the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), published by Routledge, which includes over 40 international contributors. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have travelled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada.
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The lecture will be in English, accompanied by an interpreter for Slovenian sign language and equipped with English subtitles.
Free of charge.
The lecture will take place via Zoom, registration at: info@scca-ljubljana.si.
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The lecture is part of the accompanying events of the exhibition Sick at Škuc Gallery (21 June – 18 July 2023).
