Crip Time

Panteha Abareshi, Absalon, John Akomfrah, Emily Barker, Franco Bellucci, Adelhyd van Bender, Brothers Sick (Ezra & Noah Benus), Franz Karl Bühler, Derrick Alexis Coard, Shawanda Corbett, Chloe Pascal Crawford, Jillian Crochet, Jesse Darling, Pepe Espaliú, Shannon Finnegan, Sharona Franklin, Isa Genzken, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Judith Hopf, Karrabing Film Collective, Mike Kelley, Christine Sun Kim, Carolyn Lazard, Guadalupe Maravilla, Park McArthur, Michelle Miles, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Cady Noland, Berenice Olmedo, Dietrich Orth, Gerhard Richter, Donald Rodney, Alex Dolores Salerno, Dolly Sen, Liza Sylvestre, Sunaura Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Constantina Zavitsanos

“You don’t need to be fixed, my queens—It’s the world that needs the fixing”
—Johanna Hedva

In a world that builds on unceasing bodily functionality, mobility, availability, and their constant expansion, every form of dysfunctionality leads to immediate exclusion or is declared in need of treatment. The violence inherent to normative conceptions of the body, and thus to education, labor, architecture, medicine, and pharmacology, is fatal. Human beings are constantly restricted and disabled by social barriers. Accessibility, however, is the basis for participation and justice. Sickness is not an individual but a collective societal matter. Health is not only a medical but also a political terrain on which social power relations play out.

Individual autonomy is a myth. Recognition of our mutual dependence, however, can help us rethink society. Rather than constant availability, the term crip time is based on the idea of multiple needs. Changed temporalities can come about, new forms of care and connection can develop, and a different way of thinking and perceiving can take hold.

The order of the day is to understand the vulnerability of our bodies as something constitutive. It is our vulnerability that makes us sensitive, perceptive, and different from one another.