27-Jan-2022
Vulnerable Looking
This essay attempts to consider more responsive and responsible forms of perception, which help reflect on artworks and ourselves through the shared experience of embodied vulnerability. I argue that transforming one’s practice of looking by engaging in disability art and vulnerability will be a potentially radical tool in one’s art-making practices and in what such art-making can provoke. Technological and media developments in the use of artistic tools have reordered our relationship between visual perception and spatial and bodily experience. By introducing ‘tools’ such as vulnerability and disability aesthetics to our art making and visual practices, we will allow ourselves to reorder more critically the artistic impact on the meaning-making of ‘disability’ and other forms of culturally excluded forms of diverse and variant embodiment. keywords; visual thinking, vulnerability, disability aesthetics, art-making, embodied reflection, ableism, variation vs deviance, unlearning artistic and visual practices