Carmen Papalia presented on his 2021 exhibitions Provisional Structures, Carmen Papalia with Vo Vo & jes sachse (curated by Nicolle Nugent, MacKenzie Art Gallery), and Fireflower, Carmen Papalia with Collin van Uchelen (curated by Whitney Mashburn, Grunt Gallery), two projects that set a new cultural standard for accessibility by nurturing creative and justice-oriented accessibility practices.
Both exhibitions are the result of long-term processes that were informed by Papalia’s 2015 Open Access manifesto, an accessibility framework that moves beyond compliance-level accessibility measures with guidelines for mutual care. Consisting of 5 tenets that describe what it means to organize support in the midst of an oppressive system, Open Access mobilizes an interrogation of the conditions that restrain agency and decision-making power over strengthening accessibility measures that are the result of legal and regulatory compliance. When put into practice, it problematizes the conventions of the accommodation paradigm for accessibility by encouraging participants to collectively envision a space that suits their needs, then share accountability towards that vision as they organize accessibility together.
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Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist with severe chronic and episodic pain. In 2021 he co-founded the Open Access Foundation for Arts & Culture (OAFAC), a pandemic-era cultural organization that aims to set a new cultural standard for accessibility by nurturing creative and justice-oriented accessibility practices. Addressing the limited representation of those with lived experience of disability in leadership roles within the visual and performing arts, OAFAC’s activities advance disability culture and artistry within a contemporary art context through disability-lead trainings, curation, public engagements, exhibitions, performances, educational campaigns and site-specific project development with artists, curators and cultural workers.
Since 2009, Papalia has used organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, the art institution and visual culture. As a convener, he establishes welcoming spaces where disabled, sick and chronically ill people build capacity for care that they lack on account of governmental failure and medical ableism. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability, a framework that erases disability experience by reinforcing ableist concepts of normalcy. In 2020, Papalia was one of 25 artists who received the Sobey Art Award; in 2019 he was a Sobey long list recipient in the West Coast / Yukon region. Papalia also received the 2014 Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary, which supported a 3-month residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the 2013 Wynn Newhouse Award. His work has been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, the Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Gallery Gachet, among others.
