Espai 13

Exhibition program

We will keep each other company when it grows dark

Artist

Helena Vinent

Dates

31/10/2024 — 19/01/2025

Place

Espai 13

Curated by

Irina Mutt

Vinent's work, shot through with crip-queer discourse and her own stance as someone who is deaf and crip*, questions the conventions related to pleasure and accessibility, thereby advocating other possibilities that offer different ways of being and of being in the world, of sharing it. Inspired by the rebelliousness of punk bands, the artist devises situations in which a gang of - for now - unknown cripples interrupts normality with anti-ableist actions. This gang's actions subvert the ableist and paternalistic vision that infantilises disabled people and reduces them to accommodating, asexual, submissive, harmless subjects without any kind of political or sexual-affective agency.

Accident features a number of actions carried out by the gang. A wall and some inaccessible steps alter the entry route and set in motion an unexpected dance, a contretemps involving looking for a lift, waiting, stepping in, and squashing up inside with friends and strangers alike. Inside the lift, a sound piece is playing, the aim of which is to convey what the exhibition suggests visually: a (sub)version of the audio-descriptive guides for the visually impaired provided by some museums. A sound description which, rather than mediating or describing works, expands the formats and content.

Accident bursts into the exhibition room and exposes the tensions between accessibility and the desire for pleasure while positing power as a negotiable fact, where ceding privileges can be a form of solidarity and a way to build affinities. An exhibition that one can enter thanks to an agreement that turns upside down the way we understand access to museums.

*Political reappropriation of the term 'cripple'.

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