KaleidoSkeleton Ti (2020)

This project is a multi-dimensional artivist act traversing radically inclusive politics, and articulating life-long pain, that subverts the racism, ableism, sexism and classism within the field of medical sciences.

KaleidoSkeleton Ti (2020) is a generative and digital new media artwork using the artists personal medical archive and lifelong lived experience of quadruple oppressions and complex lived experience(s). It is a public testimony of private pain, and a site of digital creative resistance against intersectional oppression (racism, ableism, sexism and classism), subverting the ‘diagnostic gaze’ and amplifying the beauty of the visibly disabled, bionic, brown, chronically ill, and female body.

Using biodata, programming, and personal medical archives, the work is an unapologetic embodiment of the physical, psychological, cognitive, cultural, spiritual, sensorial, medical and societal pain that manifests in the lives of the hidden, unheard and the unrepresented.

The work digs into the root of intersectional and technoscience ableism, and retransforms negative chronic pain stigma (and society’s fear of pain and physical vulnerability) through centring autonomy and returning biodata back in a form that acknowledges and highlights disabled worth, and world-remaking skills.

Disabled people are constantly subjected to tests quantified by doctors, and expected to undergo surgeries that serve no purpose than to ‘normalise’ the body, all whilst experiencing a lack of autonomy, privacy, dignity, and choice. This project rejects, and highlights, these medical and societal forms of oppression, during the current global pandemic where the UK’s largest minority – disabled people – are shielding, subjected to an increase in ableism and intersectional oppression, experiencing overwhelming additional social barriers (including to social care, housing, and healthcare) whilst also managing their own health as a person at high-risk.

To view more work stemming from this project, please click ‘Part Two’, below.

X-rays (under the data protection act), images and works. All Rights Reserved ©️ 2020 Aminder Virdee.