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Taking a recent curatorial project, 'Activating Captions', as a departure point, Stephanie Bailey considers the ways in which artists and audiences are marginalised by definitions of disability that derive from an 'ideology of the abled' and asks how, through greater understanding and shared experience, we might achieve real intersectionality.
It's morning in Brooklyn, and writer Sara Novic is watching Law & Order: SVU with friends after a night of picklebacks. They're laughing at the caption for the programme's theme song - [funky mystery music] -and wonder how appropriate the descriptor is. 'Define funky, one of them says' Novic is recalling the memory in the third person. 'Define music, she thinks.'
In its broadest sense, the question of definition speaks to the impossibility of truly expressing the essence of something so commonly shared and yet so disparately experienced, much like life itself. An experience that is becoming increasingly fraught in a world where multiple crises - from the embodied to the geopolitical - are intensifying under the conditions of a historic system that has enjoyed a monopoly not only on how humans are defined, but how humans live in relation to each other, not to mention the planet and its lifeforms.
This problem with definition intersects with what late professor Tobin Siebers called 'the ideology of ability', which he described as 'the baseline by which humanness is determined' - a baseline that is refuted in the collaborative curatorial work of artist Christine Sun Kim and curator Niels Van Tomme, for which Novic penned Captions on Captions. The text forms part of a series of essays and interviews commissioned for Activating Captions, hosted on Argos's website between 6 April and 8 June, with a site-specific intervention of vinyl lettering on the Brussels-based gallery's window, Rue des Commergants 62 Sounds, 2021, comprising sounds recorded by Sharon Finnegan and observations written by Sven Dehens and Chloe Chignell.
Activating Captions' foregrounded audio-visual works by artists who engage - critically, speculatively, creatively - with captioning as a tool and a response to issues surrounding legibility and access in audiovisual culture. Central to the inquiry is the question of what captions are, how they function, and what they could be or do, especially if they are considered integral to a work's...