An art exhibit at the Hamilton Public Library is exploring the diverse experiences of people with disabilities, to tell a story that its curators say often goes untold.
It’s co-curated by Shanthiya Baheerathan, a co-founder of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, and Constanza Farias, a member of its youth action council.
Baheerathan said they wanted to reflect people’s personal experiences through a larger historical narrative. This way individual stories would be told together.
Part of the exhibit — Not (Just) Disabled Bodies: Past(s) and Present(s) — is a timeline on legislation against people with disabilities or those labelled “unfit.”
It includes injustices in Canada’s history, like abuses at the Huronia site in Orillia — the oldest institution for people with developmental disabilities in Ontario, which was shut down in 2009.
Baheerathan visited the site this year with a friend to see the unmarked graves where people were buried.
“Institutions existed all over Canada,” she said. “You don’t realize…very few people talk about it.”
Constanza Farias’ piece El Escritorio shows photos of a desk. The changes in the pictures, she says, challenges people to think about the “invisible forces” that influence the lives of people living with disabilities. (Christine Rankin)
The timeline also includes a “history of resistance” that people have carried forward against injustices.
“You kind of start to see how the systems are constructed when you see these alternate narratives and histories,” she said.
While the work aims to put these stories in the public’s eye, Baheerathan said going through the process made her feel like the gap of knowledge of mistreatment is even wider that she thought.
“If these histories are what I’m able to access through institutional documents, then there’s so much more that could have been erased,” she said.
“We move through the world knowing that what’s written in the textbooks isn’t true…but to be able to place that narrative on the wall, and also grapple with the fact that even we don’t know…you start realizing why there’s histories of mistrust against larger systems.”
Sahra Soudi’s piece asks what “access for all” means “in a context where state violence against Black disabled people is normalized and even expected.” (Christine Rankin)
Putting art in a public place, Baheerathan says, means that people who were unable to participate or didn’t know about the project can still experience it.
The exhibit also includes a photo-essay and a piece on black disabled persons who have “died at the hands of law enforcement.” Artist Sahra Soudi printed the names of those killed on fabric.
The organization also reached out to the community for stories. Farias said they wanted to reflect a “collective consciousness” on ableism and what it would mean to live with disability “freely.”
“We got a lot of response from the community. Reading all of those comments about what abelism means for them, for everybody in their life…it’s so much more than just a concept or a buzzword,” she said. “It becomes so real.”
The exhibit, Not (Just) Disabled Bodies: Past(s) and Present(s), will stay up at the Hamilton Public Library’s central branch until January. (Christine Rankin)
She said while there is a uniqueness to each person’s experience, the art shows common threads between them.
Farias gathered text and overlapped it with images and time lapse videos to convey the feeling of the words. She said that seeing it all come together was an emotional, eye-opening experience.
And by creating a collective video, Baheerathan said, the artwork calls out systems that are disabling — not the individuals. She said it also shows hope that “there can be a world where people with disabilities can be free to be.”
Farias says they hope to apply for grants so that they can further support disabled artists and their voices.
The exhibit will up at the central branch until January.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
