“Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” was a peripatetic series of exhibitions, public programs, and community projects curated by Taraneh Fazeli between 2016–2020 addressing the politics of health, disability, race, and care.The curatorial proposition for this internationally-referenced arts project valued interdependencies and dependencies – models rooted in care, disability, and Black and postcolonial transnational feminisms – as the basis of ethical relations. It countered the over-valorization of independence in US society and examined how globalized racial capitalism has produced debility in many populations while creating bureaucratic infrastructures that support very few. It was part of a wave of exhibitions which brought discourses on health, disability, and accessibility into the mainstream of Western contemporary art, and notably brought a racial analysis which wasn’t foregrounded in many other projects on disability in mainstream arts at the time. The curatorial methodology of the project was rooted in the trajectory from rights to justice frameworks in the US, and employed the attendant representational strategies of opacity and occlusion over visibility: beyond the main exhibitions, which provided general access points, many in depth activities were intentionally developed to occur outside of the public eye.The project proposed that better incorporation of the states and temporalities of debility, disability, healing, and rest into society could be resistive to forms of ableism and dominant temporal regimes by offering possibilities for rethinking collectivity. In different ways, the methods and outcomes of many of the artists in the project centered ethics of care rooted in disability justice, racial justice, and anti-assimilationist queer movements. Going beyond thematics, the artists rethought received practices and definitions by using the material of care and lived experiences with debility and disability as creative material: crip time, access, inter/dependency. They used creative spaces to express love for disabled lives, resist ableism’s intersection with racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity, and build collective wellbeing and health autonomy. Individual artworks addressed infrastructure, care, ancestral healing, illness, fitness, sleep, somatic sustainability, debt, dependency, crip or decolonial temporalities, and wellness culture.— from the Allied Media Projects page
This curatorial project explores how care, interdependency, and alternative temporalities rooted in Disability Justice and Black and postcolonial feminisms can challenge dominant capitalist ideals around productivity.• Tech Literacy & Accessibility: The project’s accessible, culturally nuanced approach brought new narratives on disability, debility, and health to the mainstream contemporary art world, supporting audiences in rethinking productivity norms and considering interdependency as essential to justice.• Reducing Harm in New Media: Through non-visible, in-depth programming and strategies of opacity, the project addressed ableism’s intersections with racial and economic exploitation, reducing harm by valuing often-overlooked lived experiences.• Data & Knowledge Stewardship: Rooted in a justice framework, this project preserves knowledge of alternative care models and resistance to capitalist temporalities, contributing to an archive of culturally nuanced approaches to collective wellbeing.