SENSELESS 2003
art / bodies / misfits
30 October - 6 December Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool
Artists
MARTIN BRUCH
ROLF GIEGOLD
WOLFGANG GEORGSDORF
JU GOSLING aka ju90
ALISON JONES
SIRKKA-LIISA SASS
SEBASTIAN SOLARI
WOLFGANG TEMMEL
WOCHENKLASSUR
SENSELESS was an international exhibition of disabled artists from Austria, Germany, Finland and the UK. The project was originally conceived and organised by artist and curator Wolfgang Temmel, as Sinnlos for the Kunstlerhaus in Graz, Austria, which was European Capital of Culture in 2003.
Exhibition Rationale
Contemporary culture reveals our own physical artificiality ever more drastically to us. Images of humans as machines, as robots, are common currency. The privileged minority now routinely chooses to be surgically altered in the pursuit of a very narrow idealised notion of physical beauty.
We all belong to one minority or another and deviate from "the average" in some way. Even those who appear to conform completely to this standard can be considered a minority, because there cannot be many of them. To what extent does society take human variability into account? We speak of freedom and equality and yet continually create exclusive spaces, accessible to an increasingly small minority.
SENSELESS was not an exhibition about the disabled, but a project which explored the methods and strategies of disability, and looked at the issues around disabling forces in daily life, society and art. SENSELESS also presented itself as a platform for "new ideas and actions". The discrimination of "disabled persons" runs like a thread through history. The artists in the exhibition saw art as an opportunity for socio-political experimentation and of strategies for change.
The exhibition included video, photography, installation and interventions in the public realm. The artists used their experiences of disability to explore a wide range of subjects and ideas. They confronted the viewer with metaphorical spaces and perceptually disconcerting situations in which they may have felt they were misfits or objects, and which provoked the recognition of otherness within themselves. In total, 4,788 visitors attended the exhibition.
SENSELESS was a collaboration between North West Disability Arts Forum and Bluecoat Arts Centre as part of DaDaFest 2003, and celebrated the European Year of Disabled People 2003.
Artists websites
