Reinhabiting, Reimagining, and Recreating Ableist Spaces: Embodied Criticality In Art

Abstract

In this chapter, we bring critical disability studies into dialogue with disability artworks that resituate critiques of inaccessibility and exclusion as complicated encounters with space, lived experience, and embodiment. Drawing on Irit Rogoff's notions of embodied criticality, and the pioneering work of performance studies scholar Petra Kuppers, we argue for an embodied, embedded, and creative form of critical disability studies - enacted through art. We examine recent performance and installation works in hotels, including Welcome Inn by British artist Christopher Samuel, and Intimate Space by Australian performance company Restless Dance Theatre. Concentrating on hotels as part-public/part-private spaces where lived experiences of power are written across human bodies and relationships. Invoking critical disability studies, we argue that Welcome Inn and Intimate Space deepen engagement with criticality as a means of exploring new possibilities for embodiment, identity, and agency. These contemporary works engage disabled and non-disabled audiences in lived, embodied, interactive, and durational critique of the inaccessibility of spaces constantly overwritten by ableist worldviews. In the process, both artworks reveal how embodied critical experiences with art may lead to new ways of inhabiting spaces - theoretical, lived, and imagined - and different ways of relating to ourselves and each other.</p