Inquiry

What is the role of community-building in a contemporary art gallery? What is the role of research, and how does it connect with the role of artistic practice? What does it look like to consider accessibility beyond the juridical framework of legislated accommodations acts (such as the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Act)? How are performance, dance, and time-based practices supported by gallery structures and systems? How are artists’ and audiences’ bodies supported not only as sites of creative work, but as sites of resistance? How is care enacted or neglected in the affective economies of art and activism? Answers to these myriad interrelated questions on the nature of support networks can be found in the labour organizing of artists and dancers, the work of artist-parent alliances and other care coalitions, the creation of protocols for care, stewardship, and collaboration on creative research. Indigenous leaders working to dismantle colonial institutional structures, performance collectives dreaming alternative economies and systems of exchange, and artists with disabilities organizing otherwise insist on the responsibility of galleries and museums to redistribute their forms of power (seen and unseen, structural and quotidian).