En-dehors

The exhibition En-dehors invites eight contemporary artists directly affected by disability and/or illness to present works that reflect their experiences from the viewpoint of emancipation.

Tragic existences, irreparable suffering in flesh or mind, bodies needing to be healed and rectified for the sake of productivity: this is how the ableist imagination depicts experiences of disability and/or illness. Stemming from a systemic oppression, this imagination is based on a medical frame of reference and its implicit norms. Cultural representations feed into oppressions and discriminations by laying the foundation of a hegemonic imagination that shapes our perceptions, our thoughts, our language and vice versa.
How can one free oneself from this?

Taking possession of public space, overturning the dominant perspective, or acquiring legitimacy in the field of academic research; building collectively, performing different relationships with bodies, or approaching disability as a transformative practice: these are all strategies for resisting restrictive representation. En-dehors shows multiple approaches, deploys counter-narratives, and reconfigures the place of intimacy in the development of a political discourse.

The exhibition is also an opportunity for a retrospective of the work of Rémi Gendarme-Cerquetti (1983-2024), an auteur documentary filmmaker.

* Crip is derived from the word “cripple”. Like the term “queer”, it is the reappropriation of a stigmatising word. Since the 19th century, disabled persons have been viewed according to a medical model, a frame of reference based on the majority, imposing a perspective of deficiency that sees their disability as an individual, exceptional, medical problem. The first disability studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, spurred on by activist movements in English-speaking countries fighting for the civil rights of disabled persons. In contrast to the medical model, the social model of disability effected a reversal: it viewed social logic as productive of disability, particularly through spatial organisation or social representations.
The 1990s saw the emergence critical disability studies, which qualified and refined the approaches to the social model. Growing out of this context—and taking inspiration from queer studies, which questioned gender and sexuality binarism in the 1980s and 1990s—crip studies developed in the 2000s, challenging the binarity between disability and ability.
They also take inspiration from the concept of intersectionality, devised by Kimberlé Crenshaw to conceive of experiences located at the intersection of several oppressions: here racism and sexism, there sexism and ableism.