Please note that this exhibition is on view at Tallinn Art Hall in Estonia and not at ARGOS!

The “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities” (2006) is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations aiming to protect the rights of people with disabilities through language and law. Building upon the treaty, while being critical towards its use of the righteous language of rights, this exhibition and programme aims to open up towards other, often underrepresented or misunderstood, conceptions of the language surrounding disability and that of disabled people.

Disarming Language, in bringing together artists, graphic designers, writers, and activists, establishes a number of critical vantage points that imagine disability beyond a stigmatised “condition”. Its purpose lies in imagining new conceptual and experiential frameworks that use language and communication in innovative ways – through, with, and beyond disability – advancing a radically more expansive point of view past limiting ableist perspectives and possibilities.

In “disarming” the stability of language and communication, the exhibition seeks to render it problematic as straightforward systems of knowledge and power, and to create a rupture which allows future possibilities for disability awareness to emerge.

Artists: Andrea Crespo, Alison O'Daniel, Canaries, Carmen Papalia and Heather Kai Smith, Dax Pierson, Erika Tammpere, Gudrun Hasle, Jeffrey Mansfield, Jesse Darling, Noëmi Lakmaier, Shannon Finnegan, Sunaura Taylor

Disarming Language: disability, communication, rupture is curated by Christine Sun Kim and Niels Van Tomme and organised in partnership between Tallinn Art Hall, Chancellor of justice of Estonia, and ARGOS.

Download the exhibition brochure here.

More info here.