Disabled Artist Symposium, 4/23/26
- Bert Stabler
- 5 minutes ago
- 48 min read
(Edited transcript from the fifth annual hybrid Disabled Artist Symposium, held online and at the Multicultural Center at Illinois State University)
BERT:
All right. Hello, everybody in the Zoom world and hello everybody at the Multicultural Center here in scenic Normal, Illinois. My name is Bert Stabler, and I'm very happy to announce is our fifth annual Disabled Artists Symposium, happening here and online and I would like to just, before I do anything, offer a few remarks and then give the floor to the three fantastic stabled artists who are going to be presenting their work.
You're welcome to ask questions in the chat or out loud once they've presented and we can have discussion, and that's basically all we're here to do today is to just share, talk about, reflect on some really amazing work being created in the present.
And again, my name is Bert. I'm a middle-aged white man wearing reading glasses, with brown hair and a face mask, black face mask, and a red T-shirt. And yeah, above me is some track lights and things.
And I want to encourage everybody to take this event at their own pace, including the artists. Please feel free to rest, to zone out, check in and out as you need to. The event is being recorded, just to make that clear. So you know, anything you miss, this will be posted on my Institutional Model blog, that's where I create and share profiles of contemporary artists doing work connected to disability, with a corrected transcript once I finish that. So please rest as needed, and, you know, use the space in a thoughtful way.I want to offer an acknowledgement to start:
The Wonsook Kim School of Art acknowledges the African diaspora violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity during and after slavery. We also acknowledge those violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity through sexuality, gender, race, wealth, language, and ability hierarchies. These hierarchies are and have been sustained by a range of power formations, including the state.
The Wonsook Kim School of Art acknowledges that the Illinois State University, the Center for the Visual Arts, and all we do, takes place on the land of multiple native nations. These lands were once home to the Illini, Peoria and the Myaamia, and later due to colonial encroachment and displacement to the Fox, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Winnebago, Ioway, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo Nations. We strive to honor the ongoing legacies of these and other indigenous peoples who may have been excluded in this acknowledgement due to historical inaccuracy and erasure.
And we acknowledge that acknowledgements such as this are necessary in their own way, but very insufficient.
So we’re going to be hearing from three artists today, and hopefully having some dialogue. The artists that we're going to hear from in order are: Pooja Pittie, agustine zegers, and Dirk Sorge. And you'll learn a lot more about them very soon.
I'm going to read Pooja’s bio as an introduction, and then she will have the floor.
Pooja Pittie is a self-taught visual artist based in Chicago, whose work explores the complex interplay between body and mind, movement and stillness. Raised in Mumbai, India, Pittie trained as an accountant and earned an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago before transitioning to a full-time art practice in 2016.
Living with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, Pittie’s work draws on the dynamics of a slowing body and an active, curious mind. Through abstract painting and fiber art, she weaves together personal memories, cultural heritage, motherhood, and her experiences of disability, creating intricate compositions that speak to resilience and identity.
Pittie has completed the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, the HATCH residency at Chicago Artists' Coalition, and the 3Arts Bodies of Work Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was the recipient of the 2022 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Chicago; and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Delhi, India). She is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.
Thank you for being here, Pooja, and we'd love to hear from you.
POOJA:
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the introduction, Bert, and for inviting me to present my work here. Really nice to see you all online today. Like Bert mentioned, I'm a visual artist, so I'm a painter and fiber artist. And I will share my screen now. So, can everyone see my screen now?
BERT:
Yes we can.
POOJA:
Okay. So I wanted to begin with this installation image from my last exhibition in Chicago, which was at the McCormick Gallery in 2024. It's the first time that I was able to present both paintings and fiber works together in the same space in a meaningful way, and my paintings had kind of evolved to visually also connect to the fiber works. So this was a really exciting kind of milestone in my practice, if you will. Paintings and fiber art, both mediums allow me to explore very different parts of the practice, but also express my disabled experience. It sounds counterintuitive, because I can list very contradictory-sounding. expressions, like movement versus stillness, or vibrant color versus a more quieter color, larger scale versus smaller scale, but the way my disability experience is, I'm interested in how these seemingly disparate expressions are actually unified, in the sense that I experienced them, sometimes all at once, sometimes over several days, or even within the same day, just shifting energies. shifting abilities, and just the unpredictability of it all.
So here you can see some paintings which, when I started painting in 2015, I tended to work quite large. I guess they're still large-scale, but I've kind of brought down the height of a painting. I used to be able to do 70, 80 inches, because I could stand and paint, and now I can no longer stand and paint, so I'm trying to stay true to my abilities and I'm only painting up to, like, 60 inches tall. So that's another way that the disability kind of shows up in my process.
So the paintings, this is one of the larger ones that I showed last year, I mean, 2024. It's about 54 inches square. And here's a detail shot just to show how these broken lines that I've been painting. Well, they are layered on top of a more expressive and gestural kind of brushwork. But this is really the effect of these short and long, kind of unstable, imperfect, broken lines. It creates this textile-like surface, which, I really enjoy how that echoes the textile part of my practice.
This is another painting from that same exhibition. My color palette varies a lot. I tend to use a lot of color. The vibrancy of the color is also an important part of expressing movement and emotion for me.
So here, it's the same painting exhibited alongside a sculptural fiber work. So this was an eight-foot-long table. And it contained these more than 240 vessels that I had hand-knitted and crocheted over the previous couple of years or so. And I basically enclosed little private notes to myself. So these were just notes from my studio diary, from screenshots of things that I saved on my phone, things that I just think about, sometimes even comments from others, either about my work or disability. Visitors could not read these notes or even see them, but they were in there, so this is like a close-up of the top of these vessels.
This is the only self-portrait that I've made. I finished it in 2023 when I turned 46, and so these are 46 hand-knitted ropes, and each rope is roughly the length of my body. And then I kind of wove them into this metal grid panel. So I really was trying to convey this sense of heaviness and a kind of unraveling, so I never weave in the ends of my fiber work, mainly because I just hate doing that. But I also like the way that the dangling threads can show the start and the finish, it can show where I've changed color, where I've ran out of yarn. And also just this feeling of, you know, if you pull at a thread, it could possibly unravel the whole piece. Which it won't, but I like to kind of portray that feeling.
So this is me a few years ago, just wanted to share how a painting begins, and it's with these really, kind of dripping thin paint that I cannot control too much, and the brushwork tends to be very gestural, very intuitive, and it forms the skeleton of the composition. After that, it's all about responding to those marks. So, painting is the more physical part of my practice. It does require me to sit at an easel, and since my disability affects my shoulder muscles as well, I'm really still trying to capture those movements with my arms that is getting more and more difficult. I have a progressive disability, so I can already think back to the last few years and see how high up my arm is able to reach, or just the changes in the gestural movements of my arm.
So, in contrast, knitting and crochet allows me to be kind of seated. Well, here I'm in my wheelchair, but most often, I'm on my couch with my feet up, And fiber has just provided this really accessible medium for me to continue to make work, to continue to explore relationships between color and form without the messiness of paint and without relying too much on not having a lot of fatigue that day, to make work. So, I work with fiber every day, every single day, for several hours a day. It can get quite obsessive.
What I'm currently working on are these larger tapestries, and I'm trying to, as the paintings get smaller in scale, as I'm painting fewer days a week for shorter hours, I wanted to explore how to bring this sense of scale to the fiber works, and so I'm really interested in how to make something big from something small. The idea of just accumulation, building in layers, which kind of connects this part, also to my drawing practice, so I've been drawing for pretty much all my life, and the threads and the way I knit and crochet, and you're, like, stacking line upon line, it really reminds me of how I approach my drawing practice as well.
So this tapestry is about 40 by 32 inches. And again, just trying to show this sense of unraveling, along with just the energy denoted by the color and the texture. This is another recent tapestry, again, formed by stitching smaller panels together, kind of constructing forms by using smaller components, I suppose.
And again, this kind of striated, horizontal stacking effect on just the representation of the line, connecting to my drawing practice, is what I'm exploring here. This one was interesting because it was a more constrained use of color for me as well. So I'm also exploring these large fields of color, but upon closer look, you'll be able to notice more subtle shifts in color or texture. But how to create these more kind of nuanced color, in relation to the paintings.
This is another constructed fiber tapestry. It's basically crochet along with weaving in some handmade cords at the bottom.
I'm also exploring space currently, so these are all these vessels that I've been knitting. I think I've been crocheting more than knitting now, but I've become really interested as I'm scaling up the fiber practice, to also see how these things that I'm making, whether it's a tapestry or a small vessel, you know, sometimes the vessels are barely 2 to 3 inches tall.
And then I've most recently been working on vessels that are about 20 inches tall, with a 40-inch diameter, so quite large. But I'm just really interested in now exploring how I want them to occupy space. The vessel is very much a metaphor for the body in my practice. There's no escaping it, that's what it is. To me, each of these vessels is like a body, and I don't work very hard to have them stay upright, so it's quite interesting when I crochet a vessel, and it does not seem to have a center of gravity, and it's just collapsing, and to me, that's beautiful.
And I'm really after that kind of imperfection and the inability to hold weight, hold its own weight. But along with that, a new direction with the vessels that I'm exploring is, what if I did support some of the vessels, right? And what if they were visible supports, and again, just trying to represent what a supported body looks like, what happens when the support is kind of failing. So these are arranged on a bookcase that kind of gives me that effect of, again, laying them along a grid, if you will.
So these are basically very new images, and mostly works in progress, but I wanted to share with you guys. So again, some vessels where I have not woven in any of the ends, and also leaving the spokes of the vessel just kind of open and unraveling.
These are the latest larger vessels that I was referring to, and on the right side image, you can see I'm trying, this is something I'm totally just playing with, is using sculpting wire to maybe support the vessel and see how I can show a body that is collapsing, but trying not to collapse, I suppose. Fiber also offers me this opportunity to feel more connected to the outside world, compared to painting, which can be a more solitary practice.
This is an image of an installation that was up at the Intuit art museum for the past year, I constructed this net with the help of an assistant, of course, but it was an irregular hand-knotted net along a 9-foot high and 20 feet or so wide wall, so pretty large, and it was in their community engagement space. And what you see at the bottom, all those paper tags are contributions from visitors. I had some prompts that were very much related to how we experience ourselves and our body, what is a sense of home, how does our body feel at home? This was part of their exhibition that was related to immigrant artists in Chicago, in which I had a few pieces as well. So it was very much related to that, and given the political climate and everything that was going on in Chicago over the last year, which we didn't know when we were planning this installation, it was very emotional, and some of the messages that people left on this, it made me very proud to be a Chicagoan, and also as an artist, very, very grateful to have the opportunity to catalogue what was going on in the minds of people that were visiting Chicago, or have lived here, and call it home.
So I'm very excited about these themes that I'm continuing to explore my first museum show will be opening in January 2027, and that's what I'm working on at the moment. I'm going to be able to present my fiber art practice at a much larger scale, possibly do a site-specific installation as well. So yeah, a lot of momentum and a very exciting time in the studio.
Thank you.
BERT:
Thank you. See, am I unmuted? There we go, thank you. (TECHNICAL FIDGETING)
That was wonderful. Thank you, Pooja. I'm seeing lots of reactions in the Zoom room, so that's beautiful. And it sounds like your solo museum exhibition is going to be focused on the fiber work?
POOJA:
Actually, we are going to be showing paintings and possibly paintings over the last nine years as well, um, because it's quite a large space. So there'll be paintings and fiber work, yeah.
BERT:
And you I was looking at the work and may have missed it. What's the museum again?
POOJA:
Oh, Elmhurst Art Museum?
BERT:
Oh, it's Elmhurst, in Illinois.
POOJA:
Yes, yeah.
BERT:
Oh, so that's fantastic. So I may actually get to see that one. We have a German artist whose work I may not get to see very soon, but yeah, your work I could see. So the chat is open if anybody has questions, we can certainly kind of progress through the artists, but it's not at all a bad thing if people have comments or questions that they want to share. And we can also offer to let people unmute themselves.
I meant to offer thanks to one of the wonderful artists who was featured last year, Megan Bent, has joined us this year in the Zoom to help me with my kind of limited perceptual capacity, with muting, with watching the chat, with all of those things. And Megan will probably be able to see if you have a hand raised or anything like that, if you wanted to make a comment on mic. But we'll certainly check the chat as well as we go.
I really like this work, and I think if we do wait until all three artists have gone, we'll have a lot of dialogue that we can encourage between between the three artists. Not seeing any further comments right now. That was really a wonderful start to this event, and I'm going to introduce agustine.
agustine zegers is a Chilean immigrant and an olfactory artist and researcher. Their work attends to the complex transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, leaning into the porosity of our shared inhalations as a site of collective potential. This practice is also rooted in horizontal sense-making, utilizing scent as an antidote to linear and ocularcentric sense perception and meaning making.
Welcome, agustine. Thank you for being here.
AGUSTINE:
Thank you, Bert, and thank you, Pooja, for your beautiful presentation. This is agustine. I'm a white Latine non-binary person with short brown hair, and I'm wearing a navy blue button up and a fragrance with notes of hay, vetiver, and some herbaceous notes.
So as Bert mentioned, my primary medium is olfactory, so I work primarily with scent in my work. So while it won't be possible to convey that sense with you today, I'll give you a sense of the kind of conceptual framework and aromas that I work with.
And today I wanted to speak to you from the corporeality of someone with a disrupted autonomic nervous system, and someone who has a sensory heightening via autistic sense making, and thinking of that embodiment as the channel through which I have been really attuned to small matter. So matter that isn't visual, but vibratory and changing and shifting. And in that scale of the molecular, the microscopic, and the small, I have found many portals not only into sensing a deeply altered present, but also creating alternatives through it, or really attuning to scent as a kind of ontology of how we can begin to melt certain structures that have become fixed and that have become large, and that don't obey the dissonant nature of molecules which are highly changing, which can't be captured, and which rely on a more empirical sense-making, rather than the rationalism that keeps us in a state of separateness and hierarchy.
So small matter is really the guiding principle in my work. And another beautiful thing about small matter and about our breaths and molecules is that it reveals our porosities and our transcorporealities with every breath, we are made by all that is around us, and we exude our physical interiority into the exterior, troubling an idea of a fixed body, a discrete body, and even an interior or an exterior.
And another thing about scent that is beautiful and also dangerous, in that porosity, is that it does show us both the noxious and the nourishing. So, as disabled kin gathering today as well, I'm sure you all have an acute awareness of the kind of porosity that our bodies have. So it's a complex site of being able to glean deeper into traces of violence that find our porous bodies, as well as gleaning perhaps other ways of being and other ways of thinking that these kind of small matter movements make possible.
And I will get started with showing some projects as well, but with a guiding question beforehand, which is: what is the smallest unit of matter through which we can understand the largest systems that hold us?
So in this kind of desensual movement that small matter has, and its capacity to move across vast amounts of space, it also holds traces of global geopolitical violence, right? We are, in the air that we share, in that breath that connects all of us and disrupts our linear bodies, we're also sharing in the traces of slow violence from pollution, airborne pathogens that we must protect ourselves from, as well as the traces of genocidal war systems that linger in the air. So, small matter, while it is very demure, perhaps, or very humble, contains information about vast, vast systems that refuse to be kept in the locality of which they originate, showing us that large systems can actually be cleaned more efficiently by paying attention to that tiny, tiny molecular scale.
So the first project I wanted to share, which I'm only able to share visually, but I would like to describe the scent for you as well. This is part of a show called A Toxin Threatens, But It Also Beckons. And this is a quote from Mel Y. Chen's essay, Toxic Animacies and Inanimate Affections. And the idea behind that was to look at plastics as a site of both joy as well as a porosity, and thinking about our own bodies, our own corporealities, as ones that are made of plastics now, that are kind of infected by this matter that we are so deeply reliant on.
So one of the pieces that I made for this show was a collection of caps from different plastic waste that had been repurposed, and then they were filled with a fragrance that I composed, which was what you call a kind of deconstructed accord and perfumery. You build structures via accord, so any combination of two or more fragrance elements is an accord, and you can work with multiple accords in one fragrance. So in this case, I made a plastic-based fragrance that had both natural and synthetic lab-made materials that, for me, what I wanted to do was to kind of haunt a really quotidian object with a smell that, is both pleasurable, but also deeply toxic or jarring, so to encounter something that is deodorized, but to bring back the kind of intensity of the production process, of the extraction process of producing this matter of plastic, which, while it's used in such hygienic settings is, you know, it's made from liquefied cemeteries of oceanic life. So there is a deep kind of archive that wants to be awakened there.
This is from an installation called Aire Interno. And this was in the lineage of the work of Hsuan L. Hsu’s work around air conditioning, as well as Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of air conditioning, which is beyond the systems that we use for conditioning our homes or spaces. Sloterdijk writes about the way that the collectivity of air has been conditioned through acts of chemical warfare, and how the air becomes a kind of mass weaponry, because of its highly mobile nature. So, as I mentioned before, this is the kind of noxious element of it, and chemical warfare began because of this transcorporeal porosity, and the way that air can truly encompass a whole environment, versus other forms of warfare, for instance, that focused on body to body, the air became this kind of weapon. And Hsuan writes about the lineage of air conditioning, and that as a way of reifying an inside and an outside. So thinking again about the inside and outside of our bodies, there's also an inside and outside of our constructed spaces, and the way that that creates different delineations for the kind of contact that we have, and our ideas of what is internal or internal. And for this installation, I used an office carpet, kind of decommissioned office carpet, as well as some HEPA filters which were scented with experimental essences made from architectural sites as well as the scent of… similar to the previous piece, bringing back the aroma of the actual materiality of air conditioning. So I made an experimental fragrance of freon, and thinking about the kind of ducts inside the building, and bringing the kind of basement and the rooms where this machinery is held to the forefront of the space.
And I'd also like to share one more exhibition, which was called Dolora Temporal. This was from 2024, at Prairie in Chicago, in Pilsen. And for this exhibition, I wanted to engage in a kind of collapse of time and space using olfaction. So the focus of this work was understanding the ancientness of fossil-fuel-derived materials like plastics, and in the case of my work, also some aroma materials which are derived from fossil fuels. So understanding the ancientness of the millions of years of life that are kind of pulled into a quote-unquote clean, or more neutral, or palatable material plastics or aromas that we encounter in our day to day.
So what I did for that purpose was, I worked with a series of other ancient materials. So I used seabed fossils and crinoid fossils, as well as ancient unguentariums, which are some of the first forms of perfume vessels, which you can see here in the back, which are, those are about 3,000 years old. And I brought these materials in with the kind of newness of plastics, and I scented them with a series of fragrances that, again, kind of collapsed time and space by bringing in smells that feel very contemporary, but are produced from these ancient materials.
So in the case of this fragrance, for instance, this was a kind of portrait of a contemporary ocean, so it's a fragrance kind of like the foamy muck on top of the ocean, the microplastics and garbage waste that's in the ocean, the deep kind of seaweed, salty murky smell of the sea, and then for these bottles, I actually, they each have one material that is derived from petroleum.
And all of the scents are quite different, but they're all very kind of industrial and jarring, things that feel very contemporary. This is one of the ancient bottles.
And then I had installation throughout the gallery of different types of crinoid fossils. So these were, I was thinking about the seabed and the bottom of the ocean as the kind of last meniscus of petrofuel extraction, or like this… this site in between this liquid inside and solid outside. So crinoids are these creatures that grow in the seabed. So I used these crinoid fossils along with some used machinery screws that have a formal similarity in their structure, despite being very different temporalities and functions. And I scented this with an extract that was made from 25 million year old amber that was extracted, as well as an extract made using a destructive heat distillation of seashells. So it has this fragrance that's very burnt, charred, this kind of seashell, oyster-like smell, very kind of deep ocean, deep time kind of fragrance.
And I think that is the last piece I'll share because I know we have some time for questions afterwards, but thank you all so much for listening and for being here.
BERT:
Thank you so much, agustine. And we do have, I think it's okay, there's just one question that's directly for agustine, so maybe we'll just throw that to them. Now it's in the chat, Bryce asked: “Many scents lose their potency over time. How do you work with this quality of decay or lifespan, both practically and also conceptually?”
AGUSTINE:
Yeah, that's a lovely question. As far as conceptually, I think the ephemerality of scent is something that really appeals to me. It's something that disobeys the timelines of art institutions, in its insistence on disappearance. So for me, the disappearance is a really beautiful and necessary component to work with as a form. I mean, everything continues to change and shift and disappear in its own timeline, but with scent, it happens quicker. So it allows us to witness deep time through a more ephemeral mechanism. And as far as the practicality, depending on the piece sometimes, you know, it's desired to kind of reach that state of evaporation quickly, but often the pieces are kind of touched up with fragrance periodically, so that people can continue to experience it. And something else that I like to practice with exhibitions, both for continued access as well as access to the space, because it's hard to smell things when you're masked in exhibitions and museums, is I like to make editions that you can then continue to spray, kind of experience in your own space as well.
BERT:
Yes. I encourage everyone to look at the web portfolios of all three artists, and agustine in particular produces sense accords and has a lot of interesting things to say, which I include a little bit of in my profile of them, regarding the way in which that allows accessibility for the experience that they're trying to create. To actually have a scent in your possession means that you can sort of use it and experience it in a number of ways that are useful and in your own time scale.
But yeah, there's so much to think about and say with agustine. And so that will open up quite a bit of conversation as we as we move on. So I'm going to, with everyone's permission, I'm going to introduce Dirk as our third artist.
Dirk Sorge is a visual artist based in Leipzig and Berlin, Germany. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from University of the Arts Berlin and M.A. in Philosophy from Technical University Berlin. His working method is conceptual and often research-based, e.g. with reference to museum collections and theoretical questions. He is interested in the interweaving of (digital) technology, image production and power structures. Recurring themes are automation, standardization, irrationality and hierarchization. As a visually disabled media artist, some of his works are influenced by his activism against ableist structures. Sorge has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions as well as at festivals in Germany and internationally. He is a founding member of Berlinklusion, a collective that promotes the active participation of people with disabilities in art and culture.
Thank you, Dirk. Welcome.
DIRK:
Yeah, thank you, Bert, and thank you, Augustine and Puya, and also Megan for the logistics in the background. So yeah, thank you for having me. I will also give a quick visual description. I'm a white man in my early 40s. I have short, dark hair, which is turning gray. I have a grey shirt and I'm sitting in a blurred out office space. I will start sharing my screen. I hope this will work. Let me find this and… here it should come. Can you see it?
BERT:
Yes we can.
DIRK:
Yes, that's good. Okay, perfect. Yeah, so, um, I will start with one of my earliest works. I was still studying at that time, like this work is from 2008. And this is a live performance in a tattoo studio. And here are three video stills from the documentation. So on the left, you have a close-up of a glove holding a tattoo needle, which is tattooing something on my chest and on the middle image you see three black circles, and one of the circles is already filled with black color. And this is my upper body laying on a, like, a stretcher, almost.
And on the right, you see the space where this is happening. So this is a real tattoo studio. This is not a gallery space. But it's a tattoo studio that was open for that night for the public. And for me, this is maybe the most personal work because I was I'm studying visual arts at that time and I was hiding my visual disability. And I was only at that time starting to be more open and learning to use a white cane in public space, for example. And when I first used my white cane in the art university, people thought that I was doing a performance. So people couldn't believe that a visual disabled person is studying visual arts. So for them it was more likely that I was doing a kind of performance.
And then I thought to myself, okay, maybe I should really do a performance and have these black circles tattooed on my chest, which are the sign that we use in Germany to indicate blind or visually impaired or disabled people in public space. So for traffic situation, you are supposed to have these black circles displayed to indicate that you have a visual disability. And for me also, I had the question, okay, what, what should I do when I'm in a sauna or when I'm going to swim, then I have nothing to put my my sign on, so I have to tattoo it on my body directly and also, of course, this is like between stigmatization and empowerment, because for me, this was an important period where I was more open about my disability.
The next work, I have to give a little content warning because it will show a close-up of an eye surgery, so if you don't want to see this, just maybe close your eyes for the next few minutes. So it's a close-up of an eye surgery of one of my eyes, I can't remember which one it was, so I will show it now.
And this is also from 2008, but the surgery was happening in 2007, so… and on this video still, it says 28, 06, 07, so it's like, it was happening in June 2007. And it also says Professor Anders, which was the person who was doing the surgery. And the image that you see is also the image that the medical person saw while doing the surgery. So we have this medical gaze, literally here in front of us, so we see how medical workers view in this case an eye surgery. And we have a tool that is doing something inside the lens, so my lens was removed and replaced by an artificial lens.
And I combined this video that I got from the doctor. I combined this video with the documentation of the production of camera lenses. So I found this video online, and where the production of camera lenses was shown and the voiceover was explaining all these little steps that are necessary to produce camera lenses, and I put the soundtrack on top of this eye surgery. And somehow it, for me, it was very, very fitting at that time. And here in this case, there's like a text on the screen that says, “And during the drilling, the optical glass is sitting on a thinner piece of glass, covered with wax.” So, in some scenes, it could always be like the voiceovers really describing the surgery. But in other scenes, it makes what becomes clear that it must be something else.
And, for me, it's interesting to have this combination, because we often describe cameras as kind of artificial eyes, but also we describe our eyes, that the eyes function somehow like cameras. So these two things are metaphors for each other, and it's not clear what is the original and what is, like, the artificial thing in the end.
The next work is a little bit more recent. It's from 2000. I was working with a museum in Leipzig at that time, which was when Corona, or COVID-19 pandemic hit. The museum was closed, so I continued working with them, but I looked at the online collection, mainly. I found many images that dealt with disability, and many of them also with blindness. I did a little video collage about these works, and I combined them with a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, the famous composer who lived in Leipzig, and who was getting almost blind in the middle or late 18th century.
And Bach also had an eye surgery, and I will not go into detail because it's a very complicated story, but I was looking at this archive or the collection of the museum, and I found many of these images, many of them have biblical scenes, so scenes from the Bible where disabled people are healed, or they are instrumentalized for some Christian narration. I will not go into detail, but for example, on the left, bottom left, you have an engraving which is based on a tapestry from Raphael, and it shows a scene in a temple or in front of a temple where a mobility impaired person is sitting on the ground and Peter and Paul are somehow creating a miracle to make him walk again. And we find many of these kinds of stories in the Bible, and this was just one part of the research. And so this was important for me because it gave me the chance to really look into detail, how these narratives have been created, that are still present until today or which are still prominent and yeah, how we look on disability sometimes.
This next work is in the ongoing work, it's part of the series started 2022, and I was, using a screen reader, I'm still sometimes using a screen reader, and sometimes I'm not, when I'm using my phone, and for example, here I was on Instagram, and when I use the screen reader, and what I should get is like a description of, of the images that people are posting, so it's called alternative text, or alt text. But most people don't put this alt text when they upload images, so they'll just leave it empty. And then what happens? The image recognition algorithm in the background creates an alt text automatically. So if you leave it empty, then something will be created automatically for you, in most cases, without you even knowing it. And this is what screen reader users will hear then.
So, for example, when I click on an image, and this is what the screen reader says, “maybe an image” or “maybe a black and white image of two people, scooter, wheelchair, rocking chair and hospital, which is very detailed. Most of them are not that detailed. Some say just “maybe an image of art”, which is not very telling, or “maybe an illustration”, which is not telling you anything. Some are also funny when they say “maybe an image of one person sitting and standing”, so it's a little bit unclear what this image is displaying, and I was studying to collect these image descriptions, I was just writing them down on notepaper, and then taking photos of them, and then uploading them again to Instagram just to
close the circle somehow. Also, there are some really false descriptions. So, for example, what I was reading you, about this, “people in a wheelchair and a hospital,” this was a false automatic description because actually the scene was not a hospital. I think it was a school, or a city hall, I can't remember, but it was not a hospital. But because people in a wheelchair are displayed, the image recognition software automatically thought, okay, this must be a hospital, maybe. So this is also how biases can be made more transparent.
Um, so the, the last work- Sorry, I'm rushing through because I don't know, I can't see the clock, so I have no clue how much time I have left. But I will go to the last work. Which is still… yes.
MEGAN:
This is Megan. I'm just sharing it over here it's 1:56 so I don't know, yeah, if that's helpful.
DIRK:
Okay, I think that's helpful because I am just… I just have one quick last work that I'm still working on.
So this is called Glass House, Handle With Care, and I'm working on this now, and I will show this in a solo exhibition in June in a small town in East Germany. And this town is or was famous for glass manufacturing, but also glass handicraft art. And for me as a visually disabled artist, glass is very interesting because it's hard for me to see, it can distort the room sometimes, it has reflections which can add to or can make orientation even harder. And also it breaks easily. It's dangerous if it's broken. So for me, it's a strange material, but also it makes nice sounds. It makes interesting sounds if you break it. But also if you just touch it with, or play with it with any, any kind of thing.
And on the left, you have some sketches of this “Fragile” pictogram, which you put on boxes for delivery when something fragile is inside, combined with a microphone. And on the middle image, this is a photo of a small motor which is hanging on a metal rod, and on this motor there's a metal spring, and on this spring there's a wire connected. And on the end of the wire, there's the tip of a white cane hanging. And this white cane is, on the right photo, you see the tip of the cane, which is touching a glass, which is hanging upside down. And a microphone is picking up this the sound.
And the idea is to have this in the middle of a space, And then, four speakers in the corners, or not directly in the corners, but it's forming a square. And I want to create the illusion of an invisible glass house. So that through the movement of sound in space, you will have the impression of being inside a glass house.
And yeah, I will just show a very short video of how this installation is moving. It's just a small peek, or sneak preview. I hope it will work. (Video plays.)
Yeah, that's all, and thank you for your attention.
BERT:
Thank you so much, Dirk. That was fantastic. And I have the oh, there's lots and lots of clapping and grateful, appreciative responses.
There was one question from our artist who's helping us today, Megan, asked about, had a question about your alt text work. And Megan asked, do you later check the AI alt description of the generated alt text?
DIRK:
Uh, can you say it again?
BERT:
Yeah, go ahead.
MEGAN:
Okay, I was gonna… I don't know if maybe I didn't put it in the chat clearly. I really love that work you shared, that has the AI generated alt descriptions that you receive when you're on social media, and then you were saying that you'll write out the AI-generated alt description, and then take a photo of it and upload it. And I was wondering…
DIRK:
Yes. Ah, okay. Gotcha.
MEGAN:
…if you checked what the AI generated, like, I don't know, maybe that's just like too far or too much, but I was like just curious, yeah, what the generated description would be for your documentation of the generated description.
DIRK:
Well, actually, I'm writing the alt text properly when I upload these photos, so I am writing the photo of handwritten text on paper, maybe an image of blah blah blah, so I'm doing it, I'm not letting the AI do it. And but I guess… I mean, maybe I checked it once and it was not so interesting, maybe it was like, um, “Maybe an image of text.” This could be one very basic, depending on how good your handwriting is, maybe then the AI can also read it.
But also what I found that this image recognition software is not really improving in the last four years. So that's why I stopped doing this. Because there was no really an improvement despite of all this buzz around AI and how good it has become the image recognition is still very basic. And it's very good to recognize different types of coffee or a pastry, or… I don't know what, but it's very basic in many other cases, not very useful, no. But thanks for the question.
MEGAN:
Yeah, it's really abysmal. So I love how your work is really bringing that into the forefront
DIRK:
Yeah, thank you so much.
BERT:
And yeah, thank you for that. And I think there's so much to just say about text, with all of these artists. But I wanted to lift up another question from the chat, which is, administrator and musician colleague of ours here at ISU, Janet asks, “Dirk mentioned it, but I am interested in how / when / what prompted you,” and I think this is a question for all of the artists, “prompted you to identify as a disabled artist. It takes courage”, she says. And so I wondered if anybody, maybe Dirk can start since you have the floor, and then maybe agustine and Pooja can also comment.
DIRK:
Yes, of course. So, I mean, for me, I decided to disclose myself when I was already studying, so I was not courageful enough on, or brave enough to do it, um, when applying for the university, so I thought, okay, now I'm… I'm safe, I was accepted, I can start studying, and now I can disclose, but of course, I also had to do it because I, um, couldn't hide it anymore, and I thought, okay, I have more disadvantages when hiding it, then when disclosing it. And yeah, it's just because I also have a progressive condition, so I just couldn't hide it anymore. So yeah, that was my reasoning behind, but it was not easy, of course, no.
BERT:
Yeah, it's a process. Pooja or agustine, did you have a thought about identifying as a disabled artist?
POOJA:
Yeah, so, um, for me, uh, being self-taught and coming into this art world where I had to suddenly just, like, talk about my work, and I remember looking up, like, how to write an artist's statement, and when I wrote it, it began and ended with talking about the disability, because not only did it factor into my process, or why I was painting the way I was painting,
what I was trying to convey with this language of abstraction, but also because, as my condition progressed, that's what gave me the courage to actually call myself an artist and take this path.
To begin with, I faced a lot of pushback, um, where people were like, “Do you want to talk about the disability up front?” I'm grateful to myself back then that I did not get swayed by people telling me not to do it, and I just decided to do it. Yeah, to me, it just doesn't make sense to talk about the work without talking about disability.
AGUSTINE
Thank you both for your answers. This is agustine. For me, I was actually really lucky in that I had a period of mentorship with Konstantina Zavitzanos about four years ago. And just slowly finding myself in a disabled community and having someone like actively coach me and also give me permission to name that more publicly is really what it took for me.
BERT:
Nice. Yeah, Constantine Zavitsanos is a really wonderful and important disabled artist. I don't remember if I… if I knew that you worked with them.
So there are folks in the in the room here, and I'm happy to pass the mic to anybody who's in the physical room. Does anybody have a have a question? I can walk around like a person with a microphone. Anybody want to ask a question or make a comment? I can riff, but-- yeah, I was hoping Barbarian would say something.
BARBARIAN:
If there's one thing I can do, it's make noise. I just wanted to thank you guys for coming and sharing your practices and your experiences with us. It's been incredible to witness.
BERT:
And thank you, Barbarian. Anybody else think of anything? So, I was wondering, I like encouraging artists to talk to each other, if, you know, like, literally, but also maybe seeing how artwork talks to artwork. And I think there's some really interesting like the contrast are striking. But I think there's like there's visual work that the Pooja makes that's like colorful and just lovely to behold. And then there's the challenging to represent work, but like conceptually like dense and poetic work that agustine makes. And then there's these like really conceptually exciting and generative juxtapositions that Dirk does where history and disability in kind of the context of the European Enlightenment history in particular that he draws on really meaningfully, that like kind of illuminates the larger you know kind of European constructs that we, you know no matter where we live, have to have to live with and shapes what disability means.
So I think there's connections that maybe like, I really, I do sort of see a connection with text, with and with the in text and nonsense and sort of container and content in both cases. I think maybe that like has to do with bodies, bodyminds that are it's abstract, but I mean, I think there's an abstractness even as Dirk's work is very has a very storytelling, representational narrative function. I think there's a lot of like abstraction in all this work.
Yeah, and I don't know, I wonder if the artists just want to speak to any of the contrasts and affinities between your works, or just responses that you have to each other, kind of seeing how you very differently portrays, maybe forms of decay, maybe forms of decomposing, maybe forms of changing and morphing. I don't know, do the artists want to talk to each other a little bit?
MEGAN:
Dirk has their hand raised.
DIRK:
Yeah, I just have some notes, and I have one question for agustine, because when you mentioned the office carpet, I immediately had like a smell in my nose, or remembering, or imagining how this carpet would smell. But I cannot really describe it, so the question is, do you have a better vocabulary, now that you're working with scent so much or did you, do you invent new words to describe scent or, because, of course, you can take photos and describe the form of the work, but how do you describe the scent, really, you're not in the space directly.
AGUSTINE:
That is a great question. Thank you. Yeah, I find that vocabulary is very limited. It's very descriptive in terms of like something smells like an object rather than having exclusive adjectives for kind of nomenclature to work with. So I personally just use a lot of poeticism, and but it's also interesting to look at the kind of molecular research, because then you can also find overlaps like with a carpet, for instance, for me, it's like a lot of the adhesive smell or there's like an off-gassing, like a vaguely industrial off-gassing that occurs, but I do actually find that it's quite limited to describe scent in general, and I do have to rely on a lot of those kind of parallels, because of the limited vocabulary.
DIRK:
Yeah, and I guess in the case of the carpet for me, it's also immediately not only describing the smell, but in my mind at least, it's also a depressing office scene that comes up automatically. So for me, it's hard to distinguish between the smell and the place where the smell maybe was most prominent for me, most impactful.
AGUSTINE:
Yes, it’s like the affect of a space is almost equal to the smell sometimes
BERT:
Yeah, there are some really, I don't know, very, very compelling descriptions of scent in agustine’s various online iterations. There's also a really good podcast I recommend an interview with agustine where they talk about the sort of historical progression, but there's a 90s one that includes the smell of hot fax machine, which there's some other things that are really good in there, but that one really strikes me.
Bryce had another question for Pooja, and Bryce asks, “Seeing your vessels, I imagine their materiality in person as being attractive. Basically, I can imagine wanting to touch them and actually feel their weight and textures. Is touch ever available as a way of witnessing your work?”
POOJA:
Um, yeah, there were… there have been a couple of opportunities where people have been able to touch the work, not the vessels that you saw in my presentation today, but definitely, you know, the net installation at Intuit, people were actually encouraged to, I had actually built the net and then also added fragments of knitting and crochet into the net, uh, so people were encouraged to interact with that. Um, there was yarn provided where they could add to the net and tie knots and, um, maybe there were people who attended other workshops there, and created small weavings, or they were encouraged to contribute those directly into the net. Um, there was also a university exhibition a couple years ago, where they had this kind of area, a sensory area where I contributed a wrapped object, um, for people to be able to handle, and touch and kind of feel all the different textures of the object, yeah.
BERT:
Lots of things get evoked for me with the vessels like they're really. They're beautiful and I really want to see them. I don't have to touch them.
POOJA:
Well, people who come to my studio, they touch things, so that's another thing.
BERT:
I could come to a studio visit, since I get to, you know live close to Chicago. But it reminds me of one thing, the ceramicist Shawanda Corbett, who has limb differences and makes these beautiful asymmetrical ceramics. And I thought they were ceramics for a moment. I hadn't remembered coming across the vessels before, and that was really, they were really striking in that way. But then they also remind me of the vessels that agustine has, the 3,000 year old perfumes from the Near East, Asia. I had a lot of really nice kind of associations with that, I just wanted to make, but I'll save that.
I think I see another comment here. “You were each so eloquent in speaking to your work and practices. I support disabled adults working as artists within a progressive art studio. Some are still building their skills and opportunities around delivering artist talks and moving toward teaching artist spaces. Any advice for them as they work on articulating their practice for others?” That's for everybody, I think.
AGUSTINE:
Maybe I can get started. Personally, I mean, I think it's related to the type of work that I make, but for me, it's really helpful to build a kind of web of thinkers that have already honed into a poetics that I can then kind of weave my own web, with so having a kind of citational practice or expanding the different registers of language and then weaving from that kind of tapestry for for your own writing.
POOJA:
Um, the one thing I… I would add here is, and this is, you know, because I am self-taught and did not- I always felt like I did not have the right vocabulary to describe things, and that I would just… it would not appear like a matured voice or, um, professional even, or everything that I tried to write or, um, speak about when I was just starting out felt very cliché. And then, I think slowly, I just started to think, like, how can I write in a simple a language as possible, and talk just in simple language, and not… I think paring down the language in which I was writing and speaking, probably helped with keeping things authentic.
I'm not trying to be something that I wasn't, because the reality is I did not go to art school, so I did not have a chance to develop the written or spoken word, and I'm still envious sometimes of artists, like, you know, agustine, Dirk, like, the way you guys talk about your work is so… it's so poetic, and I think my advice would be, if you have the vocabulary, of course, like, that's… to me, that's enhancing the practice, almost, right? Like, the way you're describing your work and what you do just adds this other layer to the… to the artwork that you're making. Um, but then sometimes it's also like, okay, whatever I have is enough. You know, like, I don't need more, and I think as a person with a disability, that's something that is a constant learning, like, whatever you have is enough, whatever you have is enough, and this balance between how you want to grow and show your work and present your work, versus just what you have, and the enoughness of that. Um, I don't know if I've made any sense, but…
DIRK:
I think it does, and I really like this, also the idea that not every artwork is the same, so not every work can be, or should be treated or talked about the same, like sometimes you don't need a big conceptual framework around everything. But for me, what I figured, what, what at least it's a good starting point is really, give an image description, because if you describe your work, then you force yourself to really pay attention to detail and decide what's important and what's not important. And then automatically you start reflecting about your work.
So, really, don't do it like this image recognition software, do it properly, and then you will have maybe some insight in your own work.
POOJA:
Um, actually, that brings me to something that I would love to ask all that is present, uh, in the presenta… in this Zoom. You know, when I first started with the fiber work, the conceptuality of disability and body seems to be, like, people can easily draw that line from from that work directly to the disability experience, disabled experience. But when I started out painting, there were many, many comments, like, by art writers, visitors, you know, critics, about “Well, your paintings are just beautiful paintings, like, where's the struggle of the disability? Like, why… why is this about disability?”
And my thought always was, well, I think Picasso said something about his work was political, because he was political, or a communist, or something, and I don't even know if it's true, but I read it somewhere. And, you know, I kind of held on to that. I was like, if I'm disabled, then all the work I'm making is about disability. Um, yeah, so when I'm talking about the work or presenting it, how important is it for the artwork to convey that, or be consumed by a viewer, without knowing anything about my disability. Um, or should they know about the disability? That's something that I think about a lot.
BERT:
Yeah, absolutely, because I don't think that's… I think it's front and center in some of Dirk's pieces, but not in others. And I think in both Pooja and agustine, it's like the work is, in many ways, just like quite abstract. It's, you know, it's beautiful in your body to like just to smell and see, and kind of imagine somatically, in both cases to be with. But there's kind of like places and spaces that agustine’s work makes you think about, makes me think about, or directly evokes, you obviously, think about all the microplastics that are, you know, inflaming us and making spaces toxic and making, causing all of these forms of chemical sensitivity and asthma and all kinds of things that are so, so widespread in ways that they never were.
And Pooja's work, it was really meaningful that your work shows at Intuit. And because what it evoked for me is a lot of the really kind of beautiful quilting work, and I thought this before I even knew you were doing these vessels. When I lived in Chicago, which has been a while, that was like some of my favorite work that I would see is when they would have fiber artists and like the lines were, like, just sort of cutting and stitching lines were so deeply fascinating. I really like looking at them so much more than I like looking at polished, clean, careful, practiced, technically adept forms of, supposedly adept forms of quilt making.
Byron is our Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer here, Byron says, “This is wonderful. While I'm not a scholar in visual art, I have done work in visual rhetoric, and I find these talks in this work fascinating. agustine, your work truly makes me think about shifting the focus to scent / aroma and rhetoric, so thank you for the possibility of expanding my work in the field of rhetoric. I loved all of these, Pooja, I came in at the very end of your segment, and I offer my apologies. Dirk, your work with body reminds me of my literary studies in the body and disability. So thank you. My thoughts are scattered, so apologies. This was wonderful.” Thanks me for organizing. You're welcome.
BYRON:
Yeah. Hey, Bert. That's why I came on to try to make it make more sense, so… But overall, I just really appreciate these, and this is really interesting and fascinating. You know, I've worked with a couple students, from the art programs and you know, I really… I basically, I do visual rhetoric work. But I just have to say again, agustine, I think this work that you're doing is really fascinating, and it really makes me think about, I want to shift some of my work from visual rhetoric, right? Um, to thinking about this work that you're doing, and I think it would just really open up, always looking for different ways to open up my field of study, so I think that really gives me an entrance and something to think about, so, if there's any kind of reading you can suggest for that, if you could, like, let Bert know, and I can start looking at some of that information, but for all three of you, I think this was just really wonderful work that you're doing.
You know, I have to say, and I'm trying to say this in a way where I'm not being insensitive, right? It's nothing bad. But I'm just always kind of cautious with the language that I'm using, because that's… but I'm in, that's my field, right? But I think, um…for me, for other areas of people who aren't in art, I think all this work makes us… can make us think about how we open up a deeper conversation about these areas that you talked about.
Dirk, when you showed the eye operation, my initial thought was, oh, I gotta log off of this. I can't watch this. But, it's so very real, because I remember my mom, while she was still living, having eye surgery, right? And not understanding what that meant to her and her body as she was going through that. So that really kind of opened up that conversation and made me think about, right, what is that experience for her as an elderly African-American woman, right, who'd never had to… who dealt with eye issues, right? For much of her life. But, you know, I had to go through that surgical experience. And when she did that, it probably was less sophisticated than it is now, and just remembering how painful that experience was for her, and her not having the words to talk about that, right? And so that piece really makes me think about that experience she had. Um, but also the kind of political part of that, right? You know, not being able to experience that. Or having a way to talk about it, as an elderly Black woman from the South, right, who was dealing with her own body issues at that time, right? Both some disabilities, but also being a Black woman, right, and finding that space as a Black woman in America, to have a space to talk about that, so I really, really appreciate that quite a bit, so all 3 of you just, thank you for doing this, and I'm glad I was able to come in.
I'm gonna have to run off to another meeting now, but I just wanted to say that, and sorry for taking up so much time, but thank you.
BERT:
Thank you for sharing this. Definitely. Thanks. And agustine did share some readings in the chat, which I will save, so I can share those with you later. Thank you so much, Dr. Craig. Appreciate that.
(From agustine in the chat: “For scent reading I highly recommend starting with Hsuan L. Hsu’s The Smell of Risk and Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance (ed. Gwenn-Ael Lynn, Debra Riley Parr)! Jim Drobnick’s work too.”)
And we are getting close to 1:30. We don't have to leave the room until two, but people may sign off and there's no need to keep people longer than they want to stay. But yeah, I really think that there's a lot to be said in, you know, in the in and beyond the Us. About how race and medical colonialism have interacted and I think maybe that's just a history people are well aware of, but it's, you know, I mean that's work that can always be made more manifest in everyday lives of people. So the story of Henrietta Lacks and her stem cells and then the long history of experimentation, artists like Carolyn Lazard and Black disabled artists bring up, is really worth thinking through.
Getting lots of “thank yous.” Are there any any more thoughts in the room? Any people actually sitting here? Raise a hand want to say anything? Yeah
ADAM:
I can speak. I had a question. Is there and this is maybe more personal, but is there a point where you stop trying to prove yourself to other people when you have a disability, like that you can be as good as them or better, or is it something that is a constant thing, where it continues throughout your artistic career?
BERT:
That's a deep question. I think that has people thinking, yeah, it's, I can maybe start off that. Being disabled and proving yourself, it's maybe a matter of like, I think there's a discretion of disclosure and like when you know when people sort of, came around to saying that they were disabled in a public way and, that's I have, you know, a whole history with that myself, and I I think there's-- ableism doesn't go away because you do or don't disclose a disability, and it changes in different contexts with different people in different settings. And so it's like whether you, you know, whether you, you know, don't care what you're judged doesn't mean you're not judged. So I guess those are some things to say is that like, you know, there's internalized ableism and there's just, then the lateral ableism between disabled people, and there's just the ableism of actual people and the ableism of the structures that we build, both physical and you know logistical and rhetorical and political in the world. And so, that's not going to go away very soon probably, but having solidarity helps a lot. And other folks, did that stir anything up, for the artists?
POOJA:
Um, one thing that I've experienced, because I've had, my disease has progressed remarkably in the last 10 years since I became an artist, so it was like, I was trying to figure outvhow to be disabled along with how to be an artist, and just… what kind of disabled person I wanted to be, what kind of artist I wanted to be. Um, and… and I struggled, and I still do, with saying no to things, or how to explain to people that my energy levels and fatigue are very unpredictable, so if you see me at the opening for one event and not at the other, please don't judge me for it.
And I think I'm trying, and this is difficult, both as a professional working artist, and in my personal life, is to just try and communicate clearly what I am choosing to do, and then not apologizing for it constantly, letting people know up front that, you know, I may not be able to show up as promised, and then trying not to worry about how that is taken, or what people think of me, and it's very, very difficult.
But yeah, I'm hoping… I mean, but I think I have become better at it, at not caring about how people think about it. Or how much they should know about this disability that I don't know much about, the doctors don't know much about.
BERT:
That was much more clear and useful than what I had to say, I think. Yeah, Dirk or agustine, did you have any thoughts on, like day-to-day with the social impact of people recognizing or not recognizing you as a disabled or otherwise different bodymind like how that, how that plays into interactions.
DIRK:
Hmm. I think for me it has so many different layers and it depends on the context. So it's hard to give a straight answer for this. I mean, sometimes it helps, of course, to be open and transparent and tell someone what's my possibility, and what's not possible, and so on. But on the other hand, in Germany at least, it's, there's like a risk of being put in a… Because we don't have a big disability arts scene in Germany, it's starting to grow, it has been maybe growing for the last 10 years.
But disability arts as a concept is not so widely accepted in Germany. So when we talk about disabled artists, many people think about, not professional artists, but people who are doing this as part of a therapy or as a hobby or in some segregate segregated homes where they do art. And we have to be very careful not to put in this category. I mean, there's nothing wrong with art therapy, but if you want to do professional art, then sometimes you have to avoid these certain, um…I don't know, yeah… Certain, um, categorization, and so then if you disclose yourself as being disabled, then there could be, like, a backlash sometimes.
BERT:
So truly, but then like one of the, I mean, it's maybe how I first found your work, Dirk, but a couple of the most interesting, where shows of disabled artists making conceptually and you know visually and impressive and you know not just in Germany, but the show was in Frankfurt was that show Crip (correction: Crip Time), from a few years ago and it seems like it's, you know, it's such a better place than you know in the US at the moment, those of us who are here, in so many ways. Given, you know you have the AFD, and you have so many other bad things, so much baggage. But still, it's that there like a a big museum, kind of global conceptual disability exhibition hasn't happened in the same way, at least in Illinois, There was a show in San Diego that was, For Dear Life, that was kind of an interesting disability art show. But I don't know, maybe less politically straightforward than the Frankfurt show.
POOJA:
Um, but I wanted to add here to Dirk's point, uh, I've been talking a lot about, yes, I'll talk about my disability up front, and I'm resisting, and have been resisting, uh, people saying, questioning whether I should do that, because I had instances where it's harmed my practice, so I applied to a local museum for a residency. And I did not get it, and the curator's feedback, where my application was very clearly discussing how I would express, like, my disabled experience and interact with the museum's collection, told me in writing, at the end of the day, your work is about formalism. Like, he just refused to talk about the disability, to acknowledge, even, how I was describing my own work. And so I realized that, you know, like Dirk is saying, like, that's the danger as an artist, if you have, if you want your work to grow and be seen in institutional spaces. Um, you know, Intuit was an easier thing, because it's like, outsider art is associated, I think, problematically with disabled artists, but… Yeah, so that's the reality, too.
BERT:
That's a good point, Intuit is associated with outsider art and, it ends up, you know, that ends up being, like, all this, you know, beautiful work there, and that is, you know, I'm so glad that you're that they are not just showing artists who are, you know, who have passed away, who were institutionalized, and their work was found after they died, or they're, you know, they're just like Howard Finster, cranking out work that is sort of fetishized in certain ways. Like they're actually embracing disabled artists who are making art on purpose, that speaks well for Intuit, and definitely doesn't speak well for that curator.
POOJA:
Yeah, Intuit actually changed their name, with their rebranding and renovation of their space, which is why I agreed to be in the show. Because it was called the Intuit Center for Outsider Art, and it's not anymore.
BERT:
That must have happened. Yeah, that's after I left.
POOJA:
Yeah.
BERT:
So glad that they probably had some, either a change of heart or a change of leadership or both.
POOJA:
Yeah.
BERT:
That does seem to resonate with Dirk’s experience pretty directly, though, that like the kind of outsider art legacy, which that I think that that is the Prinzhorn Collection was in Germany, I think, that was the big inspiration for many German Bauhaus artists was the work of artists with mental difference, from a psychiatric institution.
But then, yeah, but that curator not, you know, not accepting your own description of your own statement on your artwork, Pooja, is also very striking. You know, I would- my reflex take would be that that sounds also maybe sexist and also maybe racist. There's a lot to unpack in somebody not taking your own, not accepting your rationale for why you make work.
Anyway, come up with a question in the room? Going to go ahead and check, trying to kind of be all 360 degrees here.
BARBARIAN:
Did they have social medias we can follow?
BERT:
Oh, there was a question about your social media handles, and I can guarantee that all three folks are on Instagram. And I I think under their names. If I'm remembering people's handles, I don't think people I don't think this group has any kind of code handles. And for those who are interested, I have already profiled Dirk and Augustine in this year, in 2026, on the Institutional Model blog, which can be found at bit.ly/institutional-model
And Pooja, I will be interviewing on May 1st, and very happy, excited about that, and that will be going up soon. I'll be interviewing more artists to come this summer. I had funding come in late, which is why this is the smallest of our Disabled Artist Symposia so far, but I'm very glad. I think it's smart, and I want to keep it at this size in the future, because I've kind of over… overloaded the roster in years past, I think because there's so many amazing artists who don't get enough attention.
Are there any comments or thoughts that any of the artists wanted to share before we wrap up? Or anybody in the Zoom room?
Well, this has been an extraordinary pleasure. Oh, there's a hand raised.
DIRK:
Sorry, I interrupted your outro. I just add one note written down when Pooja presented. The close-up of the unfinished vessels. I really, really liked how they look like plants, where these, um, yeah, these threads are hanging loose and not really finished. I really like this, I just wanted to say this before we we close with everything. Thanks.
POOJA:
Oh, thanks so much. Thank you.
BERT:
That kind of would… that's where I got the sort of thing I wanted to say about… I don't… I mean, you know, I use the word decay and decomposing and, you know, and change and, you know it's part of the process, but I also thought that was so beautiful. And that's like you know, a thread, as it were, that I saw with all three artists is that there's the sense of, you know, degeneration. Which is also, you know, kind of expanding and rejuvenating the body, like, integrating you into something bigger, you know, of course, when your boundaries break down, you become part of something bigger. Yeah. So anyway, beautiful work.
I hope to interact with all of you again, Pooja, I look forward to talking to you very soon. Thank you to everybody for making time to be here today. And I look forward to more of these in the future. Thank you, everybody.
POOJA:
Thank you, thank you, everybody.
AGUSTINE:
Thank you, everyone. Goodbye.
DIRK:
Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye.
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