Crucial Conversations for Disabled Artists: Collective Voices/Personal Labour

We are delighted to announce that the next of our Crucial Conversations provocateurs is the distinguished artist Ashokkumar D Mistry. Ashok is a writer and visual artist working in a range of disciplines including paint, digital art, and film. He works individually but much of his work happens either alongside or in collaboration with others. He is a neurodivergent, multidisciplinary artist, writer, researcher, activist & curator working in the UK and internationally. Subverting technologies and ideologies, he challenges conventional ways of making & viewing art. The second on our series of Crucial Conversations for Disabled Artists is on the theme of Collective Voices / Personal Labour which takes place online on Monday 15 April, 2.00-3.30pm.

Today's conversation recognises the power of collective voices but wants to explore the personal labour we, as disabled people, put into this. For decades, much of sharing our voices was through direct activism or channelled through disabled people's development organisations. How do we get together, in the absence of meaningful resources and infrastructure to support us, and raise our voices when needed? There are so many examples in our history, in our today and in our tomorrows - but also need protection of time, energy and a shared load. Are there models we could develop in which we safeguard ourselves whilst still having an impact?

At this conversation we will have two provocations and group discussion allowing us to take away ingredients for our personal manifestos of hope. 


About Ashokkumar D Mistry
Ashokkumar Mistry is a Leicester-based artist, practitioner and researcher. Ashok’s research scrutinises differences to expand our understanding of the human condition that includes impairment and disability.  His work is dialogic; encouraging interaction and debate. In an economy of inattentive distraction, his work asks us to pay close attention. By working against the insistence for consistent and reducible product, Ashok issues a challenge to cultural institutions and actively seeks to reshape expectations.

Ashok unsettles the mythology of national identity and focuses on the ways in which symbols and images are encoded and naturalised. His work often alights on the entanglement of cultural transmission and mistranslation. Archival images are embellished, remixed, edited and decontextualised to interrogate their latent ideologies.

“His words and work — with its swift detours and provocations, its messiness and expansiveness — offers us a productive disorientation. It upends assumptions about good taste, about where things fit or don’t, about what is good and bad.”
From Swift Detours - George Vasey.

Ashok is co-founder of the Disability in British Art (DIBA) research group within the British Art Network, has delivered lectures relating to arts and disability at UK universities, and is an associate of DASH Arts’ Future Curators Programme. Currently Ashok is a founder member of two disabled artists collectives, ONYX collective and Comrades Mistry has been commissioned to write for British Art Network, Shape Arts and Unlimited. Ashok has also been an Associate Artist with and has written extensively for Disability Arts Online and has also been a Fellow of the International Association Of Art Critics (AICA-UK). 


​Booking for Crucial Conversations - Collective Voices/Personal Labour
Crucial Conversations are disabled only spaces - please do not book a space if you are not a disabled person. 
​Disabled artists can book for this event on Eventbrite here.
 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/845785285557?aff=oddtdtcreator​

Access 
Please book as soon as possible if you have access requirements and do tell us what you need in your booking form on Eventbrite. Thank you. 

You can find out more about other Crucial Conversations and provocateurs on our website here. ​Knowledge Action Change - LITTLE COG

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