Cerebral palsy is a condition that affects movement, posture and co-ordination. Alan turns his body for the camera. The camera captures the relative difficulty of movement and balance for Alan. This pseudo-scientific POV in Alan’s performance mocks the historic objectification and defeats the convention of beauty as a form of conformity to an unrealisable goal that continues to oppress us all.
As with my collaboration with Lewis Fisher for SELFIE, we are exploring the intimidation and repression of the ‘disabled’ as an analogy for the unobtainable expectation of conformity especially crystallised by the aesthetic rules of any commercial imperative.
These examples of representations of the disabled (which also include Man exercising for the camera, Ukraine 2017) re-appropriate the subject’s reality free from any established conceptual expectation of beauty. Disability is relative and negative only through the prism of prejudice deeply etched into the rules of conventional representation.
