From Symbolic to Transformative: Disability, Race, and Equity in Contemporary Art

On Crip Technique, Knowledge and Expertise, Berlin

I want contemporary art to address hard things—especially when it claims to create space for marginalized people. Within the arts, programming for so-called “underrepresented communities” is often framed as an act of visibility and community-building. Yet I find myself asking: why do I still feel so detached, so invisible?

Recently, in Berlin, I’ve attended several cultural events, including a symposium focused on disability and performance. I notice—and it continues to trouble me—that people leave the most urgent conversations until the very end. It’s as if the final thirty minutes are the designated time to speak about the “elephant in the room.”

Only then does the dialogue open up to what’s real: the economic precarity of artists, censorship, housing crises, and the social hierarchies that determine who gets to belong in cultural spaces.

For me, these are not abstract issues. They shape my livelihood and my ability to exist as a disabled artist. Living with a brain injury means isolation is an unavoidable reality. Mobility challenges, chronic pain, and fatigue make participation in cultural life complex. “For those already navigating multiple forms of vulnerability, the concept of ‘polycrisis’ transcends theory and becomes a lived reality.”

That’s why it feels especially frustrating when organizers push the most challenging conversations to the end. That structure mirrors the exclusion it claims to resist. When people delay authentic dialogue, it becomes symbolic rather than transformative—maintaining comfort for some while sidelining those who urgently need these discussions due to their lived experiences and circumstances.

At the symposium, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by other disabled people. It was unexpectedly comforting. I could relax into my body—allow my facial tics, my moments of spacing out, my pain—without apology. There was relief in that shared space of understanding. And yet, I still found myself wondering: what are we actually doing here? Whose voices and needs are we truly centering?

Because even within this gathering, something vital was missing. There was no visible BIPOC representation among the speakers or organizers. I was grateful when someone finally raised the issue—but again, it came at the end. The symposium closed with what should have been its beginning: a discussion about race, intersectionality, and whose experiences get to define disability within the arts.

There are disabled BIPOC people who were not in that room—but their absence was not accidental. It reflects a pattern in the contemporary art world that still struggles to see inclusion as an intersectional responsibility rather than an afterthought. I don’t want to trade one form of invisibility for another.

What I want—what I believe we need—is to start with the hard conversations. To bring them to the forefront, not as closing statements but as the foundation for everything that follows. Because if we can’t face the structural inequities within our own cultural spaces, how can we claim to be building a future that is genuinely accessible, equitable, and real?