Panel Discussion: Cripping the Art World

Iarlaith Ni Fheorais is a curator and writer based between the UK and Ireland. In 2022 she curated Speech Sounds at VISUAL Carlow, and was formerly Assistant Curator of Young People’s Programmes at Tate. She writes for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She is currently developing an Arts Council England funded access toolkit for curators and producers and is an Independent Producer with field:arts. She is currently studying MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. 

As a curator she is invested in how access informs the production and display of work. In the same vein, she researches the legacies of medicine and pathology and how they inform notions of nationhood, modernity and the self. Similarly, her practice is attentive to the relationship between identity-formation and colonisation

Jamila Prowse is never quite sure of her identity; her sense of self is in a continual state of flux. Some days she is an artist, others a writer, researcher or lecturer. Often she feels disabled and can be found working from her sickbed; but some weeks she has a burst of feeling abled. As a mixed-race person, she has the benefit and difficulty of passing (as expressed by Sara Ahmed) and is living proof of the itinerant, mutability of identity formation (after Paul Gilroy). The one constant is that she is continually processing her ever-changing identity and lived experience through her practice; mining the innermost workings of her interior life in the hopes of demonstrating that no matter who we are, we are not alone. 

Presently, Jamila is an artist on UAL Decolonising Institute’s 20/20 programme and Sussex University’s Full Stack Feminism Project, where she will be making artistic visualisations of her ongoing research into disability inclusivity and cripping the art world. Her first artist film An Echo For My Father (2021), was commissioned by Lighthouse and considers losing a parental figure and access to one side of your heritage. She is now working on the follow-up films retracing her ancestry and relationship with her late father, the South African jazz musician Russell Herman. In 2023 Jamila will continue to work across moving image, textiles and programming while journeying towards her first solo exhibition at Quench Gallery, Margate in September. Jamila is an Associate Lecturer on BA and MA Fine Art Photography and Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of Arts London. Previous exhibitions and screenings include Studio Voltaire (London), Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen), Obsidian Coast (Bradford) and South London Gallery.