Liverpool-based arts organisation DaDa return in December with their annual Edward Rushton Social Justice Lecture which takes place at Museum of Liverpool on Sunday, 3rd December from 1-3pm, held on United Nations International Day for People with Disabilities and named after the local poet, activist, abolitionist, and disabled man, Edward Rushton.
This year, the insightful and influential disabled artist Ashokkumar D Mistry will be exploring ‘Reclaiming Nonchalance’, a lecture challenging art world values to envisage the worth of Deaf Disabled and Neurodivergent artists working in their essential state. This year’s lecture addresses the mechanisms for valuing people, valuing everyone. Reclaiming Nonchalance is an invitation to activate ambition through the self-care of actively thinking beyond other people’s expectations. The lecture will dissect artworld mechanics and interrogate how Deaf Disabled and Neurodivergent artists are valued.
We don’t want to have to be activists – however, it’s existential – instead, we want disabled artists to be able to make art that doesn’t exist to be worthy but ploughs its own course and the nonchalance of its substance is taken at face value.
Ashokkumar Mistry
Ashok will be joined by panelists Kai Syng Tan (Artist / Agitator / Professor), Sonia Boué (Artist / Writer / Consultant) and Dr Linzi Stauvers (Acting Artistic Director, Education, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham) to discuss the topic. The lecture is presented in conjunction with Disability Arts Online and will also be live-streamed on the day and then made available on demand.
We return this year with our Edward Rushton Social Justice Lecture, and we are thrilled that our keynote speaker is the perceptive and provocative artist, writer, researcher, activist & curator, Ashokkumar D Mistry.
His research scrutinises differences to expand our understanding of the human condition that includes impairment and disability.
We are thankful for the support of Museum of Liverpool and to collaborate with Disability Arts Online to host the event. We welcome everyone to come along to this free and penetrating lecture given by wonderfully astute speakers, highlighting disability as a social justice issue that all of society needs to address.
Rachel Rogers and Ngozi Ugochukwu for DaDa
EDWARD RUSHTON LECTURE with Ashok Mistry Museum of Liverpool and online, Sunday 3rd December 1 – 3pm Tickets: FREE
The free tickets can be booked via the website on www.dadafest.co.uk
About
DaDa is an award-winning and pioneering disability and Deaf arts organisation based in Liverpool with international reach and impact. Founded in 1984, we were one of the first disability-led arts organisations in the UK and an integral part of the campaign for greater equality and access for disabled, Deaf and neurodivergent people. As an organisation, we are known widely for DaDaFest, our biennial cross-arts festival which has nurtured and supported many renowned disabled artists from the UK and beyond since its first iteration in 2001. In 2020, our festival theme Translations continued a 12-year journey for the organisation using the prefix ’trans’, used for its Latin meaning, ‘through,’ with its implications of change and moving forward. Now, the organisation wants to continue its pioneering work by reimagining trusted formats, refocusing on our social justice mission and exploring new ways to enable Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists to create challenging, entertaining and powerful work.
Ashokkumar Mistry is a proudly Leicester-based, Neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist, writer, researcher, activist & curator working in the UK and internationally. Subverting technologies and ideologies, he challenges conventional ways of making & viewing art. Mistry’s research scrutinises differences to expand our understanding of the human condition that includes impairment and disability. His work is dialogic, encouraging interaction and debate. In an economy of inattentive distraction, his work asks us to pay close attention. By working against the insistence for consistent and reducible product, Mistry issues a challenge to cultural institutions and actively seeks to reshape expectations. Mistry unsettles the mythology of national identity and focuses on the ways in which symbols and images are encoded and naturalised. His work often alights on the entanglement of cultural transmission and mistranslation. Archival images are embellished, remixed, edited and decontextualised to interrogate their latent ideologies. Mistry is co-founder of the Disability in British Art (DIBA) research group within the British Art Network, has delivered lectures relating to arts and disability at UK universities, and is an associate of DASH Arts’ Future Curators Programme. Currently Mistry is a founder member of two disabled artists collectives, ONYX collective and Comrades. Mistry has been commissioned to write for British Art Network, Shape Arts and Unlimited. Mistry has also been an Associate Artist with and has written extensively for Disability Arts Online and has also been a Fellow of the International Association Of Art Critics (AICA-UK).
