APV Collective - Perspectives on Visibility

About

How have ways of seeing & being seen reshaped the nuances of accessibility under lockdown? Three film vignettes made and released between 2020 and 2021 explore the subjective relationships with accessibility and visibility of three performance- based artists. The films were produced remotely using custom-made proxy tools, wearable phone rigs and video-conferencing software. Each of the works was respectively produced collaboratively with artist Sky Cubacub, part of Radical Visibility Collective, who’s garment-making focusses on the marginalisation of LGBTQ+ disabled people; Ebony Rose Dark, a visually impaired black drag performance artist, making work around seeing and being seen; and Sophie Hoyle whose practice explores an intersectional approach to post-colonial, queer, feminist, critical psychiatry and disability issues.

Perspectives on Visibility has been curated and produced by APV, building on their ongoing work exploring access to protest (proxyprotest.com), and was commissioned by Control Shift Network.

APV (an abbreviation of Access, Power & Visibility) are a London-based collective addressing issues around Disability Justice in the UK by exploring notions of radical accessibility, the relationship between power and presence, and accessibility as concept and medium.

Formed by designer and educator Arjun Harrison-Mann, artist and producer Benjamin Redgrove and writer and designer Kaiya Waerea, the collective are allies to the Disability Justice Movement and their work is grounded in The Social Model of Disability*. Stemming from personal lived experience as well as experience of the UK disability benefits system, their work oscillates between provocation and service, contemplation and practicality.

*The Social Model of Disability is a framework that understands disability as the result of barriers which are socially produced, instead of a purely individual and medical issue. It refutes the Medical Model, which, in short, sees curing and correcting the functioning of an individual’s body and mind as the main way of bringing about social integration of people living with impairments and illnesses, eroding diversity. The Social Model instead sees the structures imposed by society as disabling, and something to be reimagined.