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“I had a lot of frustration about the performance of diversity, equality and inclusion,” says curator Nathalie Boobis. Feeling that the art world’s commitment to access for disabled people was often performative rather than manifesting a sincere commitment to change, Boobis decided to step away. But then came an opportunity to be the in-house curator for Disability Arts Online’s new exhibition space dis_place, and she felt this was finally her chance to highlight disabled experiences in art.
Her inaugural exhibition for dis_place is called I Need to Be More Than a Lesson You Learned. Featuring the work of nine artists and collectives working across several media, it explores the ways in which disabled artists have experienced inaccessibility within the art world and wider society.
Some of the pieces share how, even when disabled artists are commissioned in a display of inclusion, access is often still lacking. Christine Sun Kim’s charcoal and oil pastel drawings, such as Degrees of Deaf Rage, vividly demonstrate her anger at superficial or inadequate access, with drawings accompanied by phrases including “Curators who think it’s fair to split my salary fee with interpreters” and “Museums with zero deaf programming (and no deaf docents/educators)”.
Exquisite Corpse, a 2026 film by Jamila Prowse, shows the artist having a conversation with her mother via the surrealist game, reflecting on the interdependence underpinning their creative practice. “Jamila is talking about not being able to meet the demands of an artist as expected in the art world, someone who can meet consistent deadlines, someone who can do it alone, and how that’s artificial anyway, because everyone is working with other people behind the scenes,” Boobis says.
The rules and restrictions of the art world are explored in other works too. Artist collective Babeworld’s film Roll for Initiative uses dice rolling as a metaphor for navigating the art world from a neurodivergent and mental health perspective. “It’s about that excitement of getting a commission, but then actually having to do it as a disabled artist, and how that can become quite a hard task to do when you can barely get out of bed, or brush your teeth,” Babeworld says.
The film demonstrates the barriers throughout the creative process, from the initial email through to the back-and-forth with curators, Zoom meetings, the physical labour of making the work, interacting with people socially, and whether the artists will have the energy to do things on certain days.
Bella Milroy has written and drawn on envelopes from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) envelopes in a striking example of reclaiming an object familiar to many disabled people. “I think they’re a really interesting space to explore the ways in which disability has a particular experience of the public and the private,” Milroy says, reflecting on how the envelopes enter the home, and how benefits applications require sending private and sensitive information.
One of the envelopes explores the way disabled artists are sometimes expected to share difficult parts of their experiences. “There are the challenges to that kind of sharing,” Milroy says, adding that it can bring disabled artists’ and their peers together, but “the flipside of that is you’re actually extremely exposed, and you’re put in positions where people are viewing some of these really difficult or hard-to-grasp experiences, and that can be really vulnerable and challenging.”
The envelopes also speak to the idea of how the benefits system is supposed to facilitate access and inclusion, but it’s also problematic, especially in the context of contemporary threats of cuts to disability benefits such as the personal independence payment (Pip), and the fear that can accompany a DWP envelope landing on the doormat.
What argument does the exhibition give to the art world about what real access and inclusion means? Boobis feels it’s twofold. Firstly, there’s the accessibility of the exhibition itself, with “easy read” text, audio descriptions and British Sign Language interpretation, for example. “We’re hoping it will set a standard for other galleries in terms of the access features they have in their exhibition. This is a way of sending a soft message of how we would like to see things happen,” she says.
The other hope is that the exhibition communicates the barriers that disabled artists face, and the gap between the performance of access and actual meaningful inclusion. She highlights too how some of the work is about intimacy and joy, challenging narratives of pity.
“I think disability is having a moment in the wider art world in terms of commissioning and exhibition making, but I would hope that isn’t just another performance or trend,” adds Boobis. “It would be good to see follow-on efforts in the shape of proper anti-ableism training in the art world, and in active support for the wider struggles against funding cuts to Pip and Access to Work [a government programme] that are affecting the disabled artists and art workers that are being programmed. And I hope that by foregrounding disabled artists’ experiences in the context of disability arts, the exhibition will help in some small way with that wider conversation.”
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I Need to Be More Than a Lesson You Learned runs online at dis_place until 31 January 2027
