Albrecht Global Lecture on Disability: “Revolutionary Forms: Aesthetics of absence and the future of disability arts”
Friday, May 3, 2019
10:00 AM - 8:00 PM
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.
DHSP Building, 1640 W. Roosevelt Rd., room 216, Chicago
10 a.m. – 12 p.m. | Meeting with Professor Carrie Sandahl and others to discuss Bodies of Work |
Access Living, 115 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago
There will be an informal reception prior to the lecture from 5:00-6:30PM at Access Living
6:30 – 8:00 p.m. | Lecture “Revolutionary Forms: Futures of disability arts” presented by Rachel da Silva Gorman |
Revolutionary Forms: Futures of disability arts
In this talk, da Silva Gorman argues for the revolutionary potential of disability aesthetics. Disability arts movements have resisted the idea that individual embodiment is the message. Many disabled artists have tried to make work that locates disability identity within, and as a dimension of, the colonial/capitalist world order. Da Silva Gorman will reflect on the politics of funding, presenting, and training in disability arts that make it difficult to make art that goes beyond the goal of inclusion in the status quo. Da Silva Gorman will talk about some art-making strategies that allow us to think about political violence, migration and exile, trauma and chronic illness, and colonialism. 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.