What if My Body is a Beacon for the World?
What if My Body is a Beacon for the World? (January 9 - 26, 2025) underlies the questions Adam Wolfond, a Toronto-based non-speaking autistic poet and artist, asks about neurodiverse differences in perception, contemplating the diversity of autistic people and their ways of living in the world.
Curated by David Liss, this exhibition is organized around a new video installation, which uses endoscopic and body cameras to show the viewer what Wolfond sees and experiences. Wolfond, in collaboration with other speaking and non-speaking neurodivergent thinkers, produces visual questions that, often literally, turn the more dominant neurotypical world upside down, where perception, direction, and form are prescribed.
The installation brings us closer to a mobile dance of perception, honing in on detail and fractalizing space and time. This poetic dance of relation foregrounds what many others background in busy contemporary life: attention to the liminal. In this exhibition Wolfond rethinks “crip time” and the ways the autistic life lives intensively in relation with the human and more-than-human.
This video installation project is made possible by the Toronto Arts Council.
Neurodiversity & Languaging:
new ways to think about collaboration & techniques that support neurodiverse creation
Saturday 11 January 2025, 3 to 5 pm
Presented by Dis Assembly & Koffler Arts Youngplace (180 Shaw Street)
This panel is convened to discuss the work of Adam Wolfond and Dis Assembly, presented in the exhibition What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World? at Koffler Arts (January 9 - 26, 2025). This is the first video/sound installation directed by a non-speaking autistic person. Poetry and artistic processes merge in this exhibition that explores autistic perception and movement as well as the techniques required to support and collaborate with autistic people beyond therapy.
Rather than gazing at the autistic in a typical narrative piece, Wolfond’s work asks us to reconsider autism as relational, where the vectors of human and more-than-human interrelationality come together in a fractalized perception of spacetime, and raises questions about neurotypicality and the dominant normative forms in which we have all been taught to move and think.
All panelists will provide a brief presentation on their work with Wolfond and other neurodiverse people, and how the processes with Dis Assembly participants are mutual collaborations rather than hierarchical assignments. This work makes us question our own assumptions about how we not only think about autism, but how a diverse human species offers alternative ways of knowing the world, leading to new grammars and forms.
Panelists include:
Dr. Erin Manning, Faculty of Fine Art at Concordia University and Director of 3 Ecologies Project, Montreal
Chris Martin, poet and author of May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism and Our Neurodiverse Future and Director of Unrestricted Editions, El Cerrito, California
Dr. Estée Klar, artist, critical disabilities/neurodiversity scholar and Director of Dis Assembly, Toronto
Adam Wolfond, man of autism, author, artist, and director of video/sound installation, What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World?, Toronto
The program will include discussion among the panelists and questions from the audience.
LOUDMOUTHS:
an autistic non-speakers' rally
Friday January 24, 2025 Adam Wolfond's multimedia installation, co-created with collaborators at Dis Assembly, includes videos, sound, stick, props and words with much to say despite his being a non-speaking "Man of Autism."
This program convenes Wolfond and two additional panelists, Massimo Bossi and William Tziavaris, and invites additional non-speakers' to share personal insights about the vitality and varieties of creative expression by non-speakers.
Adam Wolfond’s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine (2023), and he has published two books, The Wanting Way (2022), and Open Book in The Way of Water (2023). He is also the co-founder of dis assembly alongside his mother Estée Klar, an artist and filmmaker who holds a PhD in Critical Disability Studies from York University.
Massimo Bossi is 20 years old. He graduated with honours from high school. He is taking a one year gap before starting a Mathematics undergrad university program. Right now, he is learning computer programming and loves it. He defines himself as a romantic traveller.
William Tziavaras is a nonspeaking high school student in Toronto, Canada. He has written, directed and performed comedy specials for his nonspeaking friends presented to international audiences. William is featured in award winning films and documentaries. He takes pride in supporting interesting projects in the disability community.