No Limits in Seoul, which was launched in 2020, returns as Disability Art Week in Seoul. Disability Art Week in Seoul will function as a laboratory of discourse exploration that cultivates major themes and perspectives of disability art by discovering its intersections with contemporary art theories and building creative methodologies and aesthetics unique to disability art; and also as a space of its practical application, combining theory and practice.

Under the theme of ‘Disability Art Manifesto,’ this year’s edition offers various programs including lectures by Korean and international speakers, a round table, workshops and exhibitions. It will discuss important issues of disability art, inclusive arts, accessibility aesthetics and senses of disability, inviting you to a field of new discourses that defies a homogenous image of art centered around non-disabled people and creatively reinterprets disability art.

Sehyung Oh
Head of Theater Project TF, Korea Disability Arts & Culture Center

An in-depth discussion on disability art is an urgent matter that we can no longer or avoid. There is a clear limitation in discussing the manifesto in a public sphere first, instead of it emerging from the field. However, disability art is being asked more than ever to join a space of constructive dialogue and debate with mainstream art and to challenge it. Along with the quantitative expansion of disability art activities and increasing interest, there is a rapid counter effect of institutionalization and rigidification. This could be a red flag for disability art, which has gained a certain level of interest, because there is a risk of it becoming restricted by even more intense marginalization.

In this year’s program, we invite scholars, practitioners and researchers who have been practicing in distinct social environments and contexts to talk about the strategies and questions disability art has been offering in order to infiltrate and challenge the rigidly established art scene. I hope it will be a great opportunity for us to deliver important intellectual inspirations and reconsider the direction of our practices.

Amanda Cachia deals with an issue that is highly relevant for us as well. As Korean art museums and performance venues are systemizing accessibility lately, there is also a concern that cultural spaces, which should provide a whole complete experience, might become a space for institutional performance. As services and manuals become more solidified, it could also increase the possibility for disability to become standardized and otherized. Through multiple examples of various direct and indirect experiences of disability being incorporated into the creative process, Cachia introduces disability art’s different attempts at dialogues with rigid institutionality. It also seems to be a reappropriation of the approach adopted by innovative artists in the middle and end of the 20th century, who gained contemporaneity of art through their critique on institutionality, into the language of disability art.

Asa Ito gives a lecture and workshop that visibly reveal differences in our physical experience ​based on the premise that they lead to distinct and unique understanding of the world. The natural inevitable experience at the basis of non-disabled senses is something changeable, and Ito tries to shake up the sense of givenness in this naturalness through the world image conceived in the absence of visual experience.

The topic of Carrie Sandahl’s lecture, which can be said to represent this year’s theme, is to boldly define the disability art aesthetics. The sense and body of disabled people have long been sealed within the realm of otherness and one might think that it takes a proclamatory and radical means to summon this unfamiliar power. Thus, the definition proposed by Sandahl might be understood as plain and composed language, but her elaborate and audacious analytical approach rigorously dissects the widespread premises that have formed the foundation of performing arts and argues that they are merely relative norms of the mainstream. At the same time, she criticizes the compliance of disability art which has contributed to the reproduction of mainstream norms and suggests we return to radical otherness.

Also, inclusive arts by Alice Fox based on consistent practice and relations of solidarity has been known in Korea but not actively embraced or applied. The fact that her views, which were introduced several years ago, have been more actively quoted and accepted in policy and institutional research rather than utilized in the practical field has a significant implication. This year’s lectures and workshops will connect the practitioners and mediators in Korea in a direct and constructive way and perform a dialogue with field-based living knowledge.

​‘Muri Muri Amuri’ prepared a talk, exhibition and workshop where producers and artists who have worked together for a long time engage in raw and vibrant expressions and conversations. Questioning the homogenous image of art portrayed in disability art and trying not to tame or judge vivacious language and expression but to deliberately multiply them, this cheerful attitude will remind us of the value of listening.

In ‘naran naran,’ there will be an exhibition and a workshop that materialize a question into visual devices – a question on the conventional thinking that degrades the possibility of equal communication with disabled subjects, even in practices of art, into ‘supplementary’ or ‘substitute’ services. I hope you will enjoy the spatial experience where the subjectivities of people with and without disabilities are treated with parallel and equal status.

I am excited to meet those who have accomplished what is still an emergent and abstract drive for us although their contexts and environments of disability art were different. They have different nationalities, identities and ideas about disability art, yet what would have made them risk putting forward provocative questions and challenges to mainstream art? Could they have worked in more adverse conditions, or been joined by more colleagues despite difficult conditions? Have their passions and strategies found the right recipients? Is a disability art manifesto an expression too premature? Maybe a message in a bottle cast into the ocean without a specific recipient? Disability Art Week in Seoul invites friends who can row the boat with us, who can encourage one another and who are not afraid to give criticism and advice for the future.