Park McArthur: Twice

With Nina Bartnitzek, Leonie Dinkloh, Daniela Fernanda Oliva Garcia, Patricia Fritze, Paula Gottschalk, Smilla Grubert, Rachel Haidu, Madeleine Häusler, Esther Heltschl, Elaine Lillian Joseph, Ann-Charlott Junior, Annelie Kebschull, Jacqueline Klemm, Antonina Kovacevic, Sophie McCuen-Koytek, Annelie Lau, Jordan Lord, Jan Müggenburg, Mariia Rakhmanova, Lea Marie Schöpper, Lili Berenike Merit Schröder, Wilson Sherwin, Chiara Steinmann, Elizaveta Voronova, Christopher Weickenmeier, Chiara Welter

The Kunstraum is pleased to present Twice, a project with artist Park McArthur and MA students at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. An October 2023 listening session of McArthur’s work at the Kunstraum launched the project, which continued into January 2024 with weekly hybrid seminar meetings. Guided by disabled artists’ ongoing experiments in description and by in-class guest lectures by historian and critic Rachel Haidu, audio describer and SoundScribe co-founder Elaine Lillian Joseph, and artist and writer Jordan Lord, the seminar studied creative practices of transcription, captioning, imagination, and distributed experience bound to the materiality of disability access (Geelia Ronkina “On Projects 195” The Contemporary Journal, 2020). Participants will draw Twice to a close by collectively producing audio descriptions in German and English. The recorded descriptions and transcripts will remain on the Kunstraum’s website following their public debut on January 17, 2024. This debut will include a student-led live tour in English. McArthur’s Kunstraum exhibition will be open to the public from January 18–February 11, 2024. For access and programming inquiries please write kunstraum [​at​] leuphana.de.

Principally developed by disabled audiences, access practices such as image and audio description are frequently employed as tools to mediate and frame already existing content. Determined as they often are by normative legacies of service-provision, including so-called “assisting technologies,” these infrastructures benefit disabled and nondisabled audiences simultaneously. While living in ableist, audist imaginaries/politics that render accessibility a means to an end, disabled artists and theorists have sought to emphasize and trouble access’s far-reaching aesthetic implications, including the ways it may differ from ideologies of transparency and order.

Artworks and texts by Gabrielle Civil, Bojana Coklyat and Finnegan Shannon (“Alt Text as Poetry“), Taraneh Fazeli, Kayla Hamilton, Louise Hickman, Georgina Kleege, Carolyn Lazard, Jordan Lord, Renate Lorenz, Geelia Ronkina, Paula Stuttman, and Constantina Zavitsanos guide Twice’s experiments into the poetic and dramaturgical charge of language-based transcription and description. The historical contemporary dispositive of aesthetic experience often privileges immediacy, presence, and embodiment built around the primacy of visual and online viewing bound to restrictive institutional modalities. While not outside these conditions, Twice mobilizes material experiences that may be more asynchronous, speculative, withdrawn, and shared.

Park McArthur experiments with personal and social meanings of debility, delay, and dependency under the guidance and instruction of disability. Recent solo exhibitions include Paid, Seattle, Washington; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Essex Street, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Organized by Kunstraum Curator/Research Assistant Christopher Weickenmeier, Tutor Patricia Fritze, and Student Assistant Nina Bartnitzek

Press inquiries: kunstraum [​at​] leuphana.de. Stay connected: Newsletter / Homepage. Opening hours Kunstraum: Wednesdays & Thursdays, 12–4pm, and by appointment.

Access the opening event and presentation via Zoom here (Meeting ID: 942 3071 2722, Passcode: twice).

*Image description: View here. An artwork of two pages with blue lettering reading “Hudson RCI,” “Voldyne 2500,” and the words “Best” “Good” “Better” stacked in boxes with measurement ranges from 750, 1000, 1250, 1500, and 2500 milliliters. The artwork references an incentive spirometer’s measurements of diaphragmatic breath and slow deep breathing. The blue lettering is printed in reverse, suggesting a view looking out from inside the spirometer.