How Great is Your Darkness?
A three-part installation for the Pavilion of Finland at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024.
It consists of a motorized wheelchair performing somersaults on the ceiling, a textile installation, and a video work.
Comissioned by Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
The work talks about hate speech against people with disabilities in social and healthcare. The article about the piece, written together with poet Sanni Purhonen, is open access in the exhibition publication The Pleasures We Choose, pages 110–137. Edited by the curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela. Publisher K. Verlag.
Hate speech against people with disabilities in social and healthcare is a taboo. Medical and social care professionals are still widely seen as the central authorities on disability-related issues, even though both the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and national legislation require the participation of people with disabilities and the recognition of their expertise. Social and medical professionals often act as gatekeepers to services that enable independent living. The disability movement speaks of structural violence, in which access to essential services is conditional upon participating in a discourse of “weakness.” This dynamic encourages professionals to interpret individual traits as “flaws” rather than as the result of inaccessible environments or expressions of human diversity. Pathologisation of individuals maintain various forms of hate speech; dehumanisation, negative stereotyping, categorisation, and othering. It is used to justify the unequal societal status of people with disabilities.
The audio description of the entire exhibition and each work can be listened online at SoundCloud.
Detailed descriptions of all the installation components: (can be exhibited separately)
2-channel video work.
Empowerment, Will, and Wit – Venice Biennale Pavilions (Part 2) / Katia Krupennikova