March Day 2: Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion

28 March 2026
10:00 – 4:30 pm
Free event
London, The Building Centre

Part of the 'What is Research Now?' series at the Paul Mellon Centre.

The Spring edition of the series is titled “Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion”. It is led by the questions: Can the legacies of Disability Art and Culture take us beyond “access” and “inclusion”? Can Disability Justice help us create and lead all of us to live better lives?

The programme – through a series of talks, performances and workshops – will explore not only histories of disability but ways of thriving and being, arguing that disability justice can be not just a subject of study but a method and mode of being. This edition is co-convened by Kenny Fries, Khairani Barokka and Sria Chatterjee.

Attend in person or join us online via Zoom — tickets available for both options.

PROGRAMME

10–10.30am: Registration at The Building Centre

10.30–10.40am: Welcome and Introduction by Sria Chatterjee, Khairani Barokka and Kenny Fries

10.40–11.10am: Beauty and the Blind by David Johnson presentation

Abstract

Blindness is both the instrument and the object of David Johnson’s art practice. As such his art is as much of blindness as it is about blindness. Whether it is the floating touchpoints of the Transient Object (2019) rendered in 3D print or whether it is the image of thought generated in the mind of the beholder in the mirrored jigsaw puzzle Blind I Stand… (2020), all of his art delineates and describes a blind-life currency, an economy of the visible and the invisible that is constitutive of blind aesthetics.

So, David’s art practice is based on an active and analytical engagement with the lived experience of being blind in the world. Early in his life as a totally blind person, he became aware that powerful artistic expression was firstly possible and secondly interesting, enjoyable and underexploited in contemporary society.

His art practice aligns itself with the contemporary outsider and disability arts culture. The most important factor in his art is the notion of blindness and disability gain that have arisen in recent years. With this comes the idea that blindness and disability, while obviously having attendant negative aspects such as pain, mental disorders and crushing inaccessibility to many aspects of modern life, does have untapped positive and generative elements. It is these elements that form the basis of David’s art practice and form the basis of his presentation.

11.10–11.25am Q&As

11.25am–12pm: Comfort Break and Refreshments

12–12.25pm : Film Screenings and Q&A with Theo Jean Cuthand (joining virtually)
Chair: Kenny Fries

Anhedonia (duration: 9 mins, 2001). Content warning: nudity
Cuthand explores social and emotional ramifications of the bipolar depression he was suffering and the relief he got when he finally tried antidepressants.

Madness in Four Actions (duration: 9 mins, 2008)
Appropriated imagery from The Miracle Worker and a backdrop made of sounds like the cassini space probe are given context with quotes from psychiatrists and people harmed by psychiatric abuse.

Love + Numbers (duration: 8:03 mins, 2004)
Interspersed between numbers stations, a bipolar Indigiqueer just out of the hospital talks about love and global paranoia.

12.25–12.55pm: On Black Pain, screening by Jameisha Prescod

Abstract

Jameisha Prescod’s essay film explores intimate stories from Black people living with chronic pain while reflecting on the colonial past of modern medicine. Using meditative visual sequences and a poetic voice-over, the film touches on medical colonialism and how it violently denied Black people the right to be seen as human. The film counters this issue by allowing three Black people with chronic pain to talk about their experiences in their own words. On Black Pain ends with the hope for a future where Black pain is believed by wider society across the world and within our own communities. A future where Black pain is seen just as urgent as anyone else’s pain.

Content warning: Strong language. Sensitive themes of illness, death, medical racism.

12.55–1.15pm: Q&As

1.15–2.15pm: Lunch break (lunch not included)

2.15–2.30pm: On Being Uncapturable: Crip-Ancestral Escapes from the Archives as Future Liberation by Khairani Barokka
Chair: Sria Chatterjee

Abstract

The Indonesian language – and many other Southeast Asian languages – has no time tenses and any singular noun can also be interpreted as plural. Through a fourteen-year interdisciplinary art and writing project, Annah, Infinite, understanding a single figure in painting through a crip, anticolonial lens and mother tongue linguistics, has yielded disabled ancestral guidance away from violence, escaping the western frame. Talking through this project, with brief performance and readings throughout, Okka invites the audience to reimagine time, “truth” and possibilities of escape from ableist disbelief and towards each other.

2.30-2.45pm: Interstitial Overlaps by Pelenakeke Brown (joining remotely)

Abstract

Interstitial Overlaps examines the shared terrain between vā and crip time, focusing on language as an interstitial practice shaped by relation, pause and repetition. By resisting linear temporality and extractive forms of meaning making, the talk proposes the in-between as a critical site for access, care and reorientation.

2.45-3pm: Q&As

3pm-3.15pm: Comfort Break

3.15-3.30pm: The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory by Kenny Fries (joining virtually)
Chair and Discussants: Sria Chatterjee and Khairani Barokka

Abstract

Kenny Fries, in his book The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, tells us two stories: the development of the theory of natural selection as articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; and the history of his ever-changing, made-to-order, orthopaedic shoes. The famous first story, as told by Fries, is a colourful account of the race between Darwin and Wallace to formulate their groundbreaking theories. At the same time, Fries tells a deeply personal story of the evolving consciousness of his own “adaptations” as represented by his shoes.

In the short chapter he will read, which ranges from orange-robed monks in Thailand to artist Henri Matisse, Fries learns that adaptation and variation are critical to survival. What is deemed “normal”, or even perfect, are passing phases of the ever-changing embodiment of nature in our world. In the end, Darwin and Wallace’s discoveries resonate with Fries’s own story, inextricably leading us into a new world where variety and difference are not only “normal” but are the ingenious origins of survival itself.

3.30–3.45pm Q&As and Concluding Remarks

3.45–4.45pm: Drinks Reception

4.00–5.30pm: Access as Contract: A Rider Writing Workshop by Roo Dhissou – *Separate Sign up* (limited numbers).

This is a practical workshop focused on writing about the conditions that make participation possible, without requiring personal disclosure. Together we’ll develop small, modular “rider fragments” that can be reused across different contexts (talks, exhibitions, residencies, collaborations, travel, deadlines and documentation).

We’ll work with prompts that cover space, time, communication, sensory needs, care, money and power. Participants can write in first person, third person or in neutral template language. We’ll then practise negotiation, using short role-play scenarios with institutions, collaborators and funders, and build a shared language bank of phrases that help you ask for what you need clearly and confidently.

The session is designed for multiple ways of contributing (speaking, writing, drawing, chat), with breaks and opt-out routes. Participants leave with a set of rider templates, negotiation phrases and a draft rider fragment pack they can adapt for their own practice.

Event location

The Building Centre (26 Store Street, London, WC1B 3JA)
https://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/about/plan-your-visit

You can also join us online via Zoom. Please sign up for 'Zoom Ticket' to receive the link.

Accessibility at a Glance at the Building Centre

✔ Level entrance from the street. The main front door has a push-button door entry. From the Ground Floor, take the lift down to the Basement, where the lecture space is located. The lift is next to the café.

✔ Live captioning

✔ British Sign Language

✔ Livestreamed

✔ Hearing loop available (please contact events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk)

✔Accessible toilets on the ground and lower ground floors

✔ The lecture room has moveable chairs rather than fixed seating. This means chairs can be rearranged or removed to create space for wheelchair users. Wheelchair spaces are not limited to one area. Our team will be available to assist with moving chairs if required.

✔ Accessible for large power wheelchairs

✔ Talks will be recorded and published online after event

✔ Masks encouraged

If you have any questions about access or event details, please email events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk

To learn more about the venue, our event guidelines, and accessibility information, please read our Pre-event information pack.

Watch our Accessibility Film

Access to The Building Centre

How to get to the Building Centre

Paul Mellon Centre Building Accessibility

Travel Bursaries

Code of Conduct for Visitors

Image: Tony Heaton, Monument to the Unintended Performer, 2012, photographed by Dave King

About the speakers

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist and editor from Jakarta, based in London. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, access as translation and environmental justice. She has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, an Artforum Must-See, and a shortlistee for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. She has a PhD by practice in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, focused on disability, visuality and ableist colonial legacies through the lens of Gauguin’s painting Annah la Javanaise.

Okka’s most recent exhibition was ACE-funded Kerokan Pol, part of the duo exhibition Languages of Intimacy (with Bella Milroy) at Birmingham School of Art’s Gallery in 2024, curated by Grand Union. It is a collection of four short films shot in Jakarta, on sick-disabled intimacies drawing from Indigeneities, against a backdrop of hypercapitalism. Her latest books are 2021’s Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize), 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches, longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize), and her 2025 speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis), an Expert Pick in the Bookseller.
Pelenakeke Brown is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across performance, writing, facilitation and public engagement. Grounded in disability theory and Sāmoan concepts of relationality, her work explores access, care and alternative temporalities through embodied and text-based practices. Brown has presented work internationally across Aotearoa, the United States and Europe, including projects developed through residencies at Eyebeam (New York), Kampnagel (Hamburg) and BRIClab (New York). Her practice often draws on archival research, storytelling and collaborative processes, foregrounding lived experience and collective knowledge making. She is the recipient of a 2024 Wynn Newhouse Award and a Creative New Zealand Pacific Arts Award, and her work has been profiled in Art in America. Alongside her studio practice, Brown regularly facilitates artist-led conversations, workshops and public programmes that centre on accessibility and community-led exchange. She is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa.
Sria Chatterjee is Head of Research Initiatives at the Paul Mellon Centre. Sria’s research interests lie at the intersection of art, science and environment and she publishes extensively on these topics. Sria leads the multi-year Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus.

In Spring 2024, Sria held a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University while on leave from the Paul Mellon Centre. She has served as a judge for the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction in 2023 and continues to serve in advisory committees for other arts organisations. Sria received her PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019.
Theo Cuthand grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He makes films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, gender and Indigeneity. His work has exhibited at galleries including MoMA in New York City, the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He completed his BFA majoring in film and video at Emily Carr University in 2005, and his Master of Arts in media production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. In 2019 he was one of the artists chosen to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation and resides in Toronto, Canada. He currently teaches at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He curated Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, the first international exhibit on Queer/disability history, activism and culture (Schwules Museum Berlin) and edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. His work has appeared in many places including the New York Times, Granta, the Believer and Literary Hub. Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany) he has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts and a Cultural Vistas/Heinrich Böll Foundation DAICOR Fellow for diverse and inclusive transatlantic public remembrance, and has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Berlin Senate, British Art Network, Culture Moves Europe and Canada Council for the Arts. Returns: Poems Selected and New will be published in June 2026 and his work in progress is Stumbling Over History: Disability and the Holocaust, which is the basis of his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940? He is a Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists.
David Johnson is a UK based, blind artist. He says he is “unashamedly a blind artist rather than an artist who is blind”. In his art he uses a wide range of materials and processes including concrete, plaster, found objects and sonics. He produces a myriad of cast objects, 3D print objects, assemblages and installations, all of which provoke, challenge and upset beholder expectations. His pieces range from the monumental to the handheld and often involve familiar, everyday objects and references. His art mission is not to overcome the barriers that blindness undoubtedly puts in the way in our visually biased world but rather to show that experiences of beauty and knowledge are core elements in a blind person’s life just as much as they are in anyone’s life.
Jameisha Prescod’s essay film explores intimate stories from Black people living with chronic pain while reflecting on the colonial past of modern medicine. Using meditative visual sequences and a poetic voice-over, the film touches on medical colonialism and how it violently denied Black people the right to be seen as human. The film counters this issue by allowing three Black people with chronic pain to talk about their experiences in their own words. On Black Pain ends with the hope for a future where Black pain is believed by wider society across the world and within our own communities. A future where Black pain is seen just as urgent as anyone else’s pain.