The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique

In this roundtable, Amanda Cachia will discuss her curatorial practice which centers around accessibility in exhibitions and museums from a disability perspective. Recent exhibitions to be discussed include Script/Rescript for San Diego State University Art Gallery (2022), Automatisme Ambulatoire for the Owens Art Gallery (2019) and Sweet Gongs Vibrating for the San Diego Art Institute (2016).

Script/Rescript, State University Art Gallery (2022)

“Script/Rescript” features the work of 10 artists who creatively reconstruct or rewrite visual language specific to individual disability conditions using past and contemporary medical scripts related to their bodies. Items like X-rays, prosthetics, canes, crutches, pills, wheelchair tires, syringes, and more serve as foundations for building new creative layers for self-expression. The artworks in this exhibition convey the identity of people with disabilities through new mappings, intersecting lines, and mark-making, as the artists infuse their medical records with memories, vivid experiences, and sensory attributes, rejecting the pathological archive.

Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, Performance, Owens Art Gallery (2019)

“Automatisme Ambulatoire” suggests irresistible impulses and movements that form relationships with bodily pathologies such as contorted faces, tics, gestures, reminiscent of the concept of the compulsive traveler. This term inspired the title and theme of the exhibition, “Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, Performance.” The exhibition features six works emphasizing performance, choreography, and installations.

Sweet Gongs Vibrating, San Diego Art Institute (2016)

“Sweet Gongs Vibrating” is a multimedia, multisensory exhibition that accommodates numerous perceptual modes, breaking away from a visually-centered perspective. Imagine obtaining new information about the body, material, or place through the sweet taste of ice cream, the sound of gongs, and vibrations on the walls. This exhibition activates sensory attributes of objects through direct contact and experiences with the audience, revealing an alternative narrative about access, place, and space.

Panel

Kyungrin Park
Director of Exhibition Space RE:PLAT
She create exhibitions and produce books while running a company called ‘New Format’. Drawing upon a humanistic imagination, they capture the currents of contemporary culture through various formats, including exhibitions, publications, forums, education, and research programs. Their publishing project, ‘Supermarket’, issues a travelogue that offers a fresh perspective on urban life. In collaboration with the members of New Format, they operate an experimental space, ‘Exhibition Space Re-Flat’, which delves into the unique value of visual arts. They specialize in visual arts, crafts, and media, exploring ways to convey stories in image and written language in collaboration with public institutions and businesses.

Jeongsoon Oum
Artist, Director of Another way of seeing
She graduated from Ewha Womans University’s College of Fine Arts and Munich University of Fine Arts, specializing in painting, photography, and installation work. She has participated in various solo and group exhibitions. In parallel with her artistic practice, she has been planning and conducting the “Another Way of Seeing” project, in which visually impaired individuals participate. This project has been ongoing since 1996.
Both of these distinct forms of work originate from the question of “What does it mean to see?” Visualizing art for the visually impaired involves creating programs and infrastructures to make art accessible to them, and the resulting works aim to be expandable, accessible content.

Speaker

Amanda Cachia

Assistant Professor and Assistant Program Director of Arts Leadership at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston

Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is 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 Ph.D. in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia, and Canada.