TAC Project for 2024-2025
For this year WIAprojects will be working with 113Research and Gallery 1313 on a Toronto Arts Council funded project, Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires.
In “Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires”, the “disabled” bodies we inhabit foreground our concerns as we, emerging and established artists/designers, curators, project leaders, and advisors, take on critical exploratory work. Here the thematic, creative forms, and community practices are embodied with our pain, frustration, confusions, limitations, desires, loves and cares.As “disabled” people, our bodies exist in tension with the normalized expectations of ordered bodies. In "Transformative Access," we examine how our bodies’ experiences remake our worlds. In conversation with ideologies, people, policies, and structures, we ask, how can the "crip" body act, given its creative potential, be centred in these practices, and be resilient to ableism.
We ask, “What can a body do...?” But then further expand this to, “What can a body do to… “? What can a body do to architectural structures, institutional expectations, medical practices, and to the very conditions that first created inaccessibility? What can a body do to realize its desires for liberatory and intimate access, to press itself, in Czech feminist Katerina Kolarova’s words, to imagine “crip horizons” — alternative possibilities in which disability can be desirable, and the structures surrounding it, profoundly contested?
Project Launch: Sept 3, 6.30PM - 8.30 PM Gallery 1313.
Exhibits & Events:
113Research
Fall: Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp in Ocular Occurrences
Winter: nancy halifax TBA
Upcoming Events OCAD University:
Fall - Workshop on Disability Aesthetics and Access Curation with Pam Patterson (CRIP Lab), Cathy Cappon & Victoria Ho (ODESI), Jack Hawk (Tangled Arts & Disability), Grace MacDonald (Assistant Curator, 113Research), Mason Smart Gallery 1313 Curator for The Window Box Gallery).
Panel: Disability Aesthetics and Inclusive Pedagogy: Pam Patterson (moderator) Mason Smart, Sean Lee, Mallory Tolcher, Chelsea Good.
Winter - Public Talks TBC with Megh Dorward, nancy halifax, & Miguel (Miggy) Jose Esteban.
Gallery 1313: