Cultivating spaces for extraordinary artists
Weaving Visability
Andrea Mindel is a textile artist who in a project at Towner Eastbourne gallery embroidered with their own hair. They are also disabled, & the relocation into the foyer of the gallery was part of a national pop-up event to make disabled creativity visible.
Jordan Whitewood-Neal visited for recessed.space, observing in how Mindel’s frame was set into the space a further reading of private & public in the everyday lives of disabled people, not least during the invisibility of Covid.
On July 2nd, the 102nd anniversary of the first international Dada art fair in Berlin, 31 disabled artists in over 30 venues across Britain and Northern Ireland, Margate to the Orkney islands, instigated an array of interventions, collectively titled We are Invisible, We are Visible (WAIWAV).
Directly drawing from the Dadaist ideology, the events were designed to challenge not only the biggest of world issues but also the pandemic induced susceptibility and invisibility that many disabled people have faced.
“Where Hans Arp ‘sought an art to cure the madness of the age’, we seek an art that performs and celebrates madness as a mirror to the world, challenging the narrow notions of what it is to be human and the limiting impact of those chains leading us ever towards oblivion,” explains Colin Hambrook, Disability Arts Online Founding Editor.
Talking to the similarities between Dada and Disability Arts he adds: “It is through the engagement with live art, performance or interventionist art in particular that similar ideals arise — of rulebreaking, anti-normality, and the art of protest.”
#WAIWAV