Table of Contents
Ileana Hernandez, Corps Roca, 2021. Photo: Michael Jachner.
With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, from 2021 to 2023, Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) initiated and steered an inter-organizational research platform, with the purpose of deepening and advancing an understanding about the creative possibilities of accessibility strategies in exhibition-making and live events. In dialogue with our two committed partners, Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) and Tangled Art + Disability, a working group evolved over the years as a consortium of voices, perspectives, and practices, thinking together about questions of access in contemporary art across a range of organizational structures, curatorial methodologies, and presentation formats. Guided by CDCC’s then Director of Education and Accessibility, Emily Cook, the Access Working Group (AWG) developed its modes of inquiry with an openness to experimentation, taking up acts of exhibition-making and programming as ways to conduct community-based research and implement responsive design. With a spirit of invention, a journey unfolded that certainly enriched CDCC’s own approach to accessibility, as a fruitful commoning of knowledge occurred between our partners, the curators and artists involved, and diverse audiences in Toronto and beyond, who continuously expanded the reach and potential of the working group itself.
On the one hand, we consider the AWG to be the culmination of CDCC’s sustained interest, since 2018, in merging accessibility strategies with advanced curatorial approaches. On the other hand, it presents a sketch of sorts for our future organizational aspirations, demonstrating how curatorial experimentation can produce unique resources for supporting practices taking place in the wider Canadian art landscape. We present this report of the AWG’s various questions and findings in hopes that this accumulated knowledge can contribute to organizational change and the advancement of curatorial practice happening elsewhere, while also strongly weaving together the creative potentials of accessibility with the question of what curating can do.
Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Où sont les ancêtres? / Where Are the Ancestors?, 2016. Photo: Mathieu Rioux. Presented as part of the exhibition Public Syntax: SAW Video at Critical Distance (2019).
The origins of CDCC’s Access Working Group stemmed from a past branch of curatorial research in our organization’s history. In 2018, having just acquired access to a public-facing façade for time-based artworks, we were undertaking a process of seeking out media art organizations with an expertise in public projection as potential partners for launching our own platform. In looking beyond Toronto’s city limits, we struck up an extended engagement with SAW Video Media Art Centre (now known as Digital Arts Resource Centre, or DARC) in Ottawa, and in particular with its then Director of Programming, Neven Lochhead. Through a fruitful exchange, a uniquely collaborative exhibition-making process emerged via another working group of sorts, involving Lochhead, CDCC’s Director Shani K Parsons and then Director of Education and Accessibility, Emily Cook. Following a discursive curatorial process, this group took up a question of how the grammars of accessibility strategies - specifically audio and image description - could nest themselves differently in the curation of time-based artworks. Importantly, the group considered how re-calibrated organizational rhythms could help to situate accessibility strategies not as an after-thought - as echoes of an already finished work, commission, or show - but as something that gets sounded from the very beginning, and which guides subsequent steps.