Presenting at Berlin Pecha Kucha Night

On the 6th November 2014 I gave my first Pecha Kucha presentation. What the hell is a Pecha Kucha, I hear you ask. A Pecha Kucha is basically someone giving a short talk with (hopefully relevant) images changing every 20 seconds in the background. The idea comes from Japan and has now become a completely branded event taking place in cities around the world. Some are interesting and inspiring while others are painfully dull.

I was invited by cultural manager and friend of mine Elisa Ganivet to contribute something for the Berlin Pecha Kucha: Mauer als Thema and I began preparing a presentation on the crossing of national borders that happens when I work internationally. Then I thought that was a bit boring – I mean, there are so many curators doing that today, and while I’m all for shedding light on the realities of curatorial labour, I felt that it wasn’t a very original or inspiring contribution.

Then I started wondering if this occasion could be used in a different way, aside from merely curatorial self-promotion. I wondered: what’s the one thing that I want people to learn from my practice most of all? It was at this moment that I realised that I needed to talk about my work with disability. Working with disability is something present within my practice for the past 6 years or so, and while not all my projects are focused on the theme of disability, since moving to Berlin over 2 years ago it is something that has become increasingly significant for myself and those I work with. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, it was my relocation to Berlin that prompted me to apply for disability status for the first time in my life, despite living with Chronic Rheumatoid Arthritis since I was four years old. It’s funny that despite having a disease that has caused me bouts of immobility and pain throughout my life, and has almost certainly rendered me “disabled” at times, I never once considered myself disabled. And this is despite the fact that I come from a country like Australia where most people at least seem quite well educated on the subject of disability and attitudes and approaches towards inclusion are quite progressive. My decision to apply for disability status was motivated primarily by my gradually aging body and inability to withstand and bounce back from the harsh European winters and stress related flare ups brought about by the usual negative conditions of curatorial labour – long, demanding and intense working hours, the stress of international travel, dealing with conflict situations and an uncertain and precarious income flow. It’s funny how recognition from the state of my disability has brought about both positive and negative effects: the subsidised treatment I now receive (which has halved my medication for the first time in over 10 years), and the ridiculous administrative system and application process that keeps applicants waiting for over 6 months without any support while they are being assessed. This double edged sword and new found status has given me much food for thought as to my own identity as a young woman curator with a disability, and what that means for my practice.

Secondly, since arriving in Berlin, I have been involved in a number of small and large projects dealing with the theme of disability on both a theoretical and practical level. While there are many positive changes taking place in Berlin to reach the same standards of inclusion and accessibility found in other major major European, American and Australian cities, there is still a long way to go, and it is for this reason that my curatorial work with disability seems all the more relevant.

With this in mind, I decided that I would use my invitation to speak at an event where I knew there wouldn’t just be “art audiences” or “disability audiences”, to speak openly and honestly about my own very personal position, and that of my position as a curator working in Berlin today. This is something I had never attempted before – speaking about my own disability, and speaking about disability as a curator – and it was terrifying. If you’d like, you can watch the video presentation, or read the original text below. Enjoy!

Curating Across Borders, by Kate Brehme

My name is Kate Brehme and I am an independent curator and arts educator. Being independent means I don’t belong to any one particular organisation, I don’t manage a collection in a museum or a gallery and I have a fair amount of freedom to work on the projects of my choosing. Most of the time.

I was born in Australia, and have lived and worked in Australia, Scotland and for the past 2 years, Berlin. Not long after I moved to Scotland in 2008, I founded Contemporary Art Exchange – a platform for my own projects that would bring together the things I am most passionate about: artists who deal with themes such as cultural identity and travel within their work, and creative professional development. Contemporary Art Exchange was a way for me to connect with the new art world I had landed in on the other side of the world and a way for me to share with others what I had learnt from the art world from my homeland. An “exchange”, if you will.

I guess you could say that my practice stems from an interest in social engagement. It wasn’t long before this interest in exchanging ideas and experiences with artists and curators from other countries developed into projects where geographic borders and time-zones started to disappear. Well, almost. With much of my curatorial work taking place outside the safe walls of an arts institution, I learnt the hard way when it came to organising and securing project necessities such as travel grants, visas and international shipments of artists’ work.

On the other hand, my work inside institutions has been largely defined by arts education based roles. It was through these positions that I learnt how to redefine and thus re-approach arts audiences. Instead of viewing gallery visitors as part of one giant public, I learnt the value in embracing various publics, individuals, and even participants, for whom no “one-size-fits-all” education or exhibition programme would suit.

These values started to seep into my curatorial work and the types of artists I started to collaborate with expanded. I’ve spent much of the past 4 years of my practice collaborating with various artists with visual disabilities based in Australia, Scotland and Berlin. Together we’ve embarked on a number of exhibitions, residencies, workshops and other events and with each project, it becomes a little easier as an independent curator to navigate and cross the barriers of creating international projects through this collaborative work. Subsequently, my work in the field of disability and the arts has expanded more generally, particularly since my arrival here in Berlin, where I often find myself in the role of a consultant or advisor on projects striving to improve accessibility for people with disabilities within our cultural institutions.

Yet, within my work there is still one barrier, one wall that I have encountered that seems at times almost impossible to cross or penetrate. This wall isn’t a physical one, but rather an attitudinal one, similar to the “Mauer im Kopf” we refer to when talking about long lasting cultural divisions between the former East and West Germanys. The wall I am talking about is the wall that prevents the inclusion and access of people with disabilities within mainstream contemporary art culture.

Inclusion and access are incredibly hot topics in Germany at the moment. They are plastered across newspapers and news programmes as the country strives to meet the international obligations it accepted upon signing the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2009. We are starting to see positive changes within society – improvements to barriers preventing travel throughout the city and steps towards creating a more inclusive education system for children with disabilities. However, when it comes to approaching disability from other perspectives, particularly from within the cultural sector – whether it is the selection of artists with disabilities as part of exhibition programing, or the full inclusion of audiences with disabilities – there still lies a wall.

The wall that I speak of, like most walls, has two sides. On one side, it is a wall of ignorance: I have come across very few arts professionals who know what defines a disability, whether their audience members have one, and what the social history of disability entails. Whilst curators don’t have to become experts, we do have to move past outdated and limited ideas of “the disabled” as being wheelchair-bound, deaf dumb or blind and not interested in contemporary art. On the other side, the wall that I speak of, is a wall of assumptions: rather than speaking from positions of authority and presuming we know what our public want and the ways in which they should learn, as curators we should strive to embrace difference and see alternative formats of exhibition programming and display as opportunities to collaborate, be innovative and be creative. The argument not to engage in this way is often fuelled by cries of a lack of resources or funding, however as an independent curator who has never had a great deal of either of these, let me reassure you that it is possible.

You’re probably wondering why on earth I’ve chosen to speak today about an issue that seems quite far from the topic of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. You’re probably also wondering why I didn’t focus on the practicalities of curating across borders, or why I didn’t present the work of the artists I work with – many of whom deal exactly with the themes of emotional and physical walls. I suppose it’s because when I think about “the wall” as a metaphor within my own work, I think about my own personal situation.

You see, I too have a disability. I have Chronic Rheumatoid Arthritis which I was diagnosed with when I was 5. Up until just recently, I had never really thought about my own impairment as a disability, despite the fact that throughout my life, I have encountered many walls because of it. During my childhood and teenage years it was frustrating not being able to participate in sports with my friends, whilst in my 20s the source of my frustration came from the lack of understanding from others or their complete disbelief in my impairment because they couldn’t see it.

When responding to the concept of the wall today, I also think about my position as a curator who is interested in social engagement. I think about my responsibility as a cultural producer to acknowledge a gap in the way in which certain parts of our society are presented and accepted by our cultural institutions. Over the years there have been many exhibitions, projects and seminars exploring the ways in which walls can divide people according to race, ethnicity, religion and class. Surely, when according to the Federal Office of Statistics every eleventh German citizen has a degree of disability of at least 50%, we can take six and a half minutes today to look at the attitudinal walls excluding these members of society too.