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).