Keep This Leaflet. You May Need To Read It Again. (2014)

New Media, Device Hacking (X-Ray Lightbox), Raspberry pi, Moving Image, Sound (via Headphones only) and Mixed Media. 1 Minute 31 Seconds (looped)

In ‘Keep This Leaflet. You May Need To Read It Again.’ I invite you to stare. Through this conscious invitation, I re-construct and challenge the diagnostic gaze and reclaim the identity (alongside the personal and political autonomy) associated with the reality of the lived experience of disability – including social abjection. I accentuate the Social Model of Disability through the theatricalization and confrontation of authentic medical imagery that is used within the Medical Model of Disability. Here, I (woman/artist/patient) reclaim control over the terms of the encounter between ‘starer’ and ‘staree’*, doctor and patient, and artist and spectator. The diagnostic gaze is additionally fractured through the use of dismembered hyperbolic sounds; these sounds mimic the personal sensory experience of living with severe chronic physical pain and life-long societal discrimination. Here, the disabled body becomes a critical aesthetic medium of political agency rather than ‘object’.

*"Staring: How We Look” (2009), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Exhibited:

• 2014, 'Crafting Anatomies', Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK.

• 2015, 'Crafting Anatomies Symposium', Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK.

• 2015, COAST Festival, Banff Castle, Scotland, UK.

All images © Aminder Virdee. Use of images is prohibited unless permission obtained by Artist.