I tumbled out of a bus in Copenhagen after thirty-four hours of trans-European public transport from northern Italy and immediately rushed home to change so I could make it to O-Overgaden to see Panteha Abareshi’s exhibition before closing time. My mood was low; my bad foot was swollen and my body hurt. But, then again, I’d biked all the way down to Bezzo from Nykøbing Falster in a new personal best time. Things could’ve hardly gotten more able-bodied and privileged than that. My state also turned out to be ill-suited to viewing an exhibition about the body. But, exerting due diligence, I made a subsequent return visit with a lower heart rate and a calmer state of mind to ensure greater professional credibility as a reviewer.
Canadian artist Panteha Abareshi has a blood disease that causes bodily disabilities. Abareshi, who uses the pronouns they/them, creates art about aspects of physical disabilities. Pain, treatments, hospitalisations, and a need for help from others are fundamental conditions of life for Abareshi, and it quickly becomes clear that with this exhibition, they want to tell us about these conditions – about all that people with able bodies do not see and all that society does not want to see.
The exhibition design is conventional. Sculptures rest on pedestals; some are mounted on the wall, and one hangs from the ceiling. Made specifically for this exhibition, the pieces comprise various medical tools: anatomical models, tubes, syringes, clamps, and measuring devices combined and put together in instructive courses that home in on a particular bodily issue or experience. Didactic representation is the works’ mainstay, as exemplified in the sculptures OBJECT DESIRE and MAKING USEFUL (OF DECAY), in which custom-molded buckles meant to attach to legs and feet are set up in positions hinting at an absent body that is sexualised, fetishised, and restrained.
Further inside the exhibition, visitors with two functional hands can control hand-held slide projectors to view images of so-called “crip porn,” a pornographic genre where the alternatively functional body is the object of desire. Explicitly sexual things are happening here – a fetishisation of bodies with disabilities – but the works also articulate the idea that an active sex life is a human right for everyone.
Abareshi’s art is underpinned by unequivocal statements and sculptural punchlines, which are often made abundantly clear in the titles. In some places, pointed messages are literally written across the sculptures, as in ANATOMICAL MODEL where light is used to simulate a fire inside a small plastic house penetrated by tubes, syringes, and containers of liquid. On the roof, the following phrase is written: “I WILL NEVER KNOW PEACE IN THIS BODY,” so that viewers will immediately understand what this sculptural metaphor for dialysis is trying to convey.
Many of the works incorporate this kind of overwriting, leaving us with little option than to read relatively directly – and so we may not think or feel as deeply as we would otherwise. The content and the reading thereof are served up simultaneously, making it difficult to reach an independent moment of contemplative realisation. After all, art works best when viewers can come to their own insights and realisations rather than being written on top of the work itself. But as I perambulated the exhibit on my two privileged legs, I acknowledged that perhaps the aesthetic rules of the game need to be reinvented a bit. In any case, when viewing the works we must bear in mind not only Abareshi’s challenged physical existence, but also the position from which they were made: from a bed, from interludes between hospitalisations, and amidst a set of conditions that an person who is able bodied can only partly imagine, but never fully understand.
As many of the works point out, being a person with a functional impairment means being subject to an overwhelming regime of power that encompasses the law and caregivers alike. The assistance available is both determined and carried out by others. I myself work as a personal caregiver and encounter such complex relationships between care and power on a daily basis. A new framework agreement recently adopted in Denmark within the field of disability support, which essentially sets out to save on the costs of care for those who need it most, is indicative of a society that still has little empathetic understanding of bodies with chronic illness. Under such frameworks, humans are reduced to economic variables, expenses to be negotiated.
The question of which bodies can even access O-Overgaden also seems to be a key element in the exhibition. Unfortunately, the wheelchair users I work for will be unable to see the exhibition because Overgaden has no lift, only a mobile stairlift. Indeed, remarkably few exhibition venues in Denmark have such access. I too am complicit in this, having run an exhibition platform that was totally inaccessible to users of wheelchairs and people with reduced mobility. But O-Overgaden is in the process of a long and commendable process of applying for permission to establish a lift and an elevator, despite legislation issues surrounding making such changes to a listed building.
Speaking of the future: Abareshi does not engage the issue of the body’s technologically emancipated future, even though this avenue would be both exciting and disturbing to pursue – one strewn with exoskeletons, robotic assistance, and whatever else we might imagine being appropriated from the military. On the contrary, the aesthetics and materiality of these works look back in time, perhaps to emphasise outdated ideas about the treatment, politics, and emancipation of people with disabilities. Although I definitely respond with a kind of aesthetic allergy to many of the material choices made, such as old computer keyboards and stripped wood, the wealth of analogue aesthetics is clearly intended to convey a sense of obsolescence; these works are meant to be difficult, and we are meant to feel unease and discomfort.
The exhibition’s relevance is undeniable. It taps into an eternally topical issue and shows nuances from the subject’s experiences of a body in involuntary pain. The works are didactic, so much so that they are at risk of being overly explanatory, thereby arresting the viewer’s train of thought. Paradoxically, they are at their strongest when an extra layer of narration is included: the vivid and nuanced deliberations shared by the artist on their Instagram account. The narratives function rather like one of those surprising DVD commentary tracks that could make even the strangest film more radical. These extras make the artworks hum all the stronger, poignantly oscillating between the political and lived life.
