Albrecht Global Lecture on Disability: “Revolutionary Forms: Aesthetics of absence and the future of disability arts” 

The UIC Department of Disability and Human Development (DHD) invites you to the Albrecht Global Lecture on Disability. This lecture series brings international scholars in the field of disability and disability studies to DHD for a formal lecture and events related to global perspectives on disability.

Access Living, 115 W. Chicago Ave.
5 – 6:30p.m.:  Informal reception; complimentary food and drinks
6:30p.m. – 8p.m.: Lecture: “Revolutionary Forms: Aesthetics of absence and the future of disability arts” 

R.S.V.P. to attend

Revolutionary Forms: Aesthetics of absence and the future of disability arts
In this talk, da Silva Gorman argues for the revolutionary potential of disability aesthetics that reject the ‘aesthetics of absence’ through which meaning is collapsed onto individualized bodies and minds. Disability arts movements have resisted the idea that individual embodiment is the message. Working against a cultural context that conflates ‘visible’ embodied traits and identity, artists have struggled to make work that locates disability identity within, and as a dimension of, the global colonial/capitalist world order. In such a cultural context, political desire beyond liberal inclusion often becomes unintelligible, and the contours of disability identity are tightly bound to a stigma/redemption binary, even as artists resist it. Some disabled Black, Indigenous and artists of colour have turned to art-making strategies that bypass identitarian representations, centering processes of colonial violence, migration, exile, and gender identity. This talk draws on narratives about disability and art, disability arts, and making-art-while-disabled.

Rachel da Silva Gorman is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of the Critical Disability Studies at York University and an artist working in dance theatre, performance, and curating. Da Silva Gorman’s research engages theory and method from fine arts, cultural studies, and social sciences; and focuses on transnational social movements, anticolonial aesthetics, anti-racist disability theory, and critiques of ideology. Her writing has appeared in Auto|Biography Studies, American Quarterly, Somatechnics, thirdspace, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Da Silva Gorman has created and choreographed 14 dance-theatre and site-specific productions, ten of which have been remounted or screened at festivals. Active in the disability arts movement in Canada since 1999, she has been a movement director for several solo theatre artists and collectives, and she teaches choreographic process in disability, BIPOC, and queer arts communities. Since 2009, she has been on the curatorial committee at A Space Gallery, where she has curated four exhibitions, and has participated in annual programming. In 2017, she received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for a performance-based research-creation project Year Five of the Revolution. She is a longtime organizer in feminist and anti-colonial movements.