July 12 – December 1, 2024
Photographer, Anna Shvets
“If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche
OUMA starts a year-long celebration focused on the creative work of Deaf and disabled artists by hosting a group exhibition entitled The Gaze, which is presented by Atlanta based Art Curator, Aleatha Lindsay, founder of The Ikouii Creative.
This Ikouii Creative invitational exhibition highlights people who live with visible and invisible disabilities. The exhibition explores ingrained, internalized ableism and inclusion, acceptance and advocacy within the disability community. Individual and collaborative works of art as well as works of art by disability-identified and non-disabled artists are included in this exhibition. This presents a unique opportunity for people to view work where disability, accessibility and ableism intersect.
“As a culture, we are at once obsessed with and intensely conflicted about the disabled body. We fear, deify, disavow, avoid, abstract, revere, conceal, and reconstruct disability – perhaps because it is one of the most universal, fundamental of human experiences. After all, we will all become disabled if we live long enough. Nonetheless, in representing disability in modernity, we have made the familiar seem strange, the human seem inhuman, the pervasive seem exceptional.” – Disability Scholar, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson
Curated by Aleatha Lindsay for The Ikouii Creative