We get in touch with things at the point they break down // Even in the absence of spectators and audiences, dust circulates

• Tara Heffernan

In his critique of the intellectual left’s body politics, disability scholar Lennard J. Davis argues that “the disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory”. The same could be said of the fashionable discourse of contemporary art. Rather than face the disabled body as a reality, trendy culture makers turn “to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text”. As somebody who was born legally blind, I have often thought about the way disability manifests in literature and art, and its amorphous metaphorical interpretations. This concern was reignited by an exhibition currently housed at West Space. We get in touch with things at the point they break down // Even in the absence of spectators and audiences, dust circulates … brings together several collaborative projects and artworks by Australian and international artists and writers. Culminating in a multi-sensory gallery experience which privileges haptic encounters, curator Fayen d’Evie uses blindness as a vehicle to subvert ocular-centric musicological practices, a concern that stems from her own diagnosis with a degenerative vision impairment.