★★★★
This year-long exhibition of deaf artists is being housed at Deaf Action. The venue in the New Town that’s home to the Edinburgh Deaf Festival (now in its fifth year). The works on display are by three artists, who each have their own vibrant style, yet compliment each other wonderfully.
Trudi Collier’s mixed-media collection Who Knows Best? Features portraits of those instrumental in the lives of the deaf community. Such was my ignorance I had no idea that Alexander Graham-Bell, the widely celebrated inventor, was a eugenicist who forced his deaf wife to speak rather than use sign-language, and didn’t believe deaf people should have children. Collier’s inspired idea to depict Graham-Bell as a clown, is a stark message to way we lionise historical figures, without confronting inconvenient truths about their outlook.
Viktoriya Rudenko’s Unboxing Audism: Living Incognito, features delicate glass sculptures of ears, usually with technological apparatus attached. They feel like artefacts from a distant culture. Perhaps that’s the way hearing people come to deaf culture, as that of something foreign. But this exhibition isn’t specifically for hearing or deaf people, it straddles the line between the two.
Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq, a Muslim deaf Pakistani-British painter and installation artist has created intensely vivid canvases, where figures seem to be almost escaping the paint. Her confrontational style is refreshing, with demanding text embedded into several works.
The exhibition is brought under the banner of Fight or Flight, the body’s reaction to a threat. These artists each seem to be responding to the threat of an ableist and increasingly far-right society. It’s a worthy response to such ignorance, and the curation is perfectly realised.
Fight or Flight: Contemporary Deaf Perspectives is on at Deaf Action until July 2027
