A new exhibition co-curated by a Department of Health and Society professor showcases artworks depicting the rituals and shared experiences that make up disability culture.
#CripRitual, running until April 1 at the Doris McCarthy Gallery and Tangled Art + Disability, is presented by the Critical Design Lab and curated by Professor Cassandra Hartblay, Aimi Hamraie, and Jarah Moesch.
Rituals are traditionally understood as a three-phase process where there is a rupture, a group enters a liminal state and then they are brought back to society with a different status, explains Prof. Hartblay. And in the process a higher power is referenced to convey the change of status. The ritual process itself is an important part of social cohesion and cultural formation.
But what if that ritual demands physical tasks a person is unable to perform? Or if a person is unable to access the space required for the ritual?
“Traditionally in social science, disability has always been understood in relation to marginalization, or the exclusion of people with disabilities from society,” says Prof. Hartblay.
The #CripRitual exhibition takes that concept and inverts it. “We talk about access, making places accessible as a type of ritual that completely shifts the way we’re thinking about disability,” says Prof. Hartblay. “So instead of thinking about people with disabilities as always liminal, always pushed to the side, as never arriving and being reincorporated back into society with a new status in the life course, we’re thinking about accessibility as a ritual process unto itself. If we think about it in that way then it becomes an argument for disability culture as a kind of subculture.”
The idea of disability culture is explored in the name of the exhibition itself, utilising the word “crip,” a reclaimed term that some disabled people use to describe their own identity or community.
#CripRitual gathers together artworks that use ritual to foreground understandings of disabled, crip, d/Deaf, Mad, and Sick people’s experiences. The exhibition highlights strategies for building crip power: the ceremonies, habits, celebrations, design practices, social scripts, and community agreements, grounded in disabled knowledge and experience, that undergird disability culture.
“We were really interested in explicating some of those rituals,” explains Professor Hartblay. “Some of these are rituals of self-care and caring for each other. A lot of the works in the exhibition are about folks living with chronic illness or chronic pain and how they care for themselves and their communities. And then there are the rituals of activism, advocacy and protest. Another theme is artmaking as a ritual unto itself, that is really important for crip survival and self-expression and claiming representations of yourself when representations of people with disability are often quite negative.”
Find out more about #CripRitual here.
Photographs by Michelle Peek Photography