Each year DaDa present our Edward Rushton Social Justice Lecture on the United Nations International Day for People with Disabilities (3rd December) to keep alive the passion and fire demonstrated by Rushton, a Liverpool poet, activist, abolitionist and disabled man.
This year the Rushton Lecture will be held at Museum of Liverpool, and we are thrilled to announce that we have secured a fantastic and insightful keynote speaker for the event, Ashokkumar D Mistry, who will be exploring ‘Reclaiming Nonchalance’ the value of disabled lives, particularly exploring the value of the lives of disabled children and young people. We are thankful to our event partners Disability Arts Online who are supporting us in presenting the event.
Exploring ‘Reclaiming Nonchalance’
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, do we not 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”.
Limited by expectations we are subject to ‘playing-to-the-gallery’ dynamics. Living beyond peoples’ expectations activates our own ambition and forces an understanding through genuine interaction. In this year’s Edward Rushton Lecture, Ashokkumar Mistry addresses the mechanisms for valuing people, valuing everyone.
About Ashokkumar D Mistry, Artist Writer Curator
Ashokkumar Mistry is a 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.
“His words and work — with its swift detours and provocations, its messiness and expansiveness — offers us a productive disorientation. It upends assumptions about good taste, about where things fit or don’t, about what is good and bad.”
From Swift Detours - George Vasey.
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).
Book your tickets now
We have released a limited number of tickets already, so head over to our Eventbrite to secure yours. If you find it sold out, do check back as we will be adding some more nearer the time. And if you can’t attend in person, do keep an eye on our social media for information about our live stream.
And block out the afternoon of 3rd December 1-3pm 2023 in your diary.
Download an easy read version of the event detail here.
Thanks to our event partners
