Ana García Jácome, Abi Palmer, Jeda Pearl & Simon Yuill
Acts of Observation
Acts of Observation was a group show by artists and writers Ana García Jácome, Jeda Pearl, Abi Palmer and Simon Yuill. The exhibition spanned our entire site and was presented as a series of solo presentations, or ‘acts’, throughout our different buildings, spaces, and online.
Dynamic in form and content, the artists brought together present a diverse range of works including film, interactive installation, writing and architectural interventions. Acts of Observation directly questioned, contextualised and challenged how we negotiate institutional language and spaces, and how disability is represented. The participating artists articulated and politicised notions of recovery and offer visions of positive, inclusive futures.
Ana García Jácome works with different media such as drawing, writing, video, and archives to address the social construction of disability and explore ways to re-articulate its narratives.
Jeda Pearl is a Scottish-Jamaican writer and poet. Inspired by existing in the ‘in between’, plus the hidden history, culture, and folklore of her ancestral islands, her work often explores the intersections of identity, belonging, secrecy and survival.
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication.
Simon Yuill is an artist and researcher. His work includes the use of interview, writing, film, custom software systems and textile works.
Acts of Observation: Poems by Jeda Pearl
Acts of Observation took its title from Jeda’s new series of poems commissioned by Collective for the exhibition. Visitors were invited to contemplate Jeda’s work on the viewing terrace where they can hear readings of the poems whilst looking out to over Edinburgh, or enjoy them via the film here.
The works thought through acts of observation and where they intersect with the Black or brown disabled body, science, archeoastronomy and the sublime. The profound and brilliantly observed poems ask: How are we observed? How do we observe ourselves? Which bodies are seen as sublime?
Simon Yuille: Recovery Time is Labour Time
For Acts of Observation, Simon produced two new works which he has developed from the text Recovery Time is Labour Time originally produced for the artist manifesto Not Going Back to Normal, a project curated by Sasha Saben Callaghan and Harry Josephine Giles.
Stimwork accompanied a new edition of Recovery Time is Labour Time. These were available for visitors to take away as an A2 poster. The text, part manifesto, part essay, expands on Simon’s work and research in relation to the politics and culture of autism and neurodiversity. Drawing on personal experience and family history, this essay focuses on ‘stimming’ - the sensory pattern-making that autistic people use for emotional regulation, recovery and interaction with the world.
The second work was a site-specific wall painting rendered on the central pillar of the Observatory. A circular loop of the words ‘Recovery Time is Labour Time’ highlighted the repetitive, ongoing and urgent need for rest as an imperative part of disabled life whilst also gesturing towards the lack of understanding that surrounds this.
Read the commissioned text online
Abi Palmer: Crip Casino
The National Health Shrine, a slowly declining tin foil monumento, was crowded with ‘prizes’ - small alien shapes made from discarded objects. The objects remained static: a reminder of sick bodies held in limbo during the pandemic.
Assessment Booth #3 documented The Assessment - a performance game, designed in collaboration with artist Jackie Hagan. In the game, audience members queue for a series of 1:1 assessments. You may win, be interrogated, required to commit fraud, or be taxed unfairly.
Crip Casino invited viewers of all ages to jump in, reconsider their position in life, and how they landed there. On entry, an interactive installation greeted you, where hacked fruit machines offer absurdist poetic diagnoses and medical instructions, delivered by the spirit of ‘Dr Elvis’. This surreal game explored the way in which medicalised spaces make decisions about the patient’s body, and who has control over this process. Can you alter the outcome of your treatment or does the house always win?
Through parodying and critiquing the wellness industry and institutional spaces, Crip Casino invited us to consider how luck affects our health, privilege and capacities; What does it mean to ‘deserve’ care and wellbeing? What must we do to earn it?
Ana García Jácome: It’s Like She Had Never Existed
Ana García Jácome works across various media to address the social construction of disability. Expanding disability discourse beyond the dominant West and North American contexts, she pushes us to question the conditions that construct these hierarchies of knowledge.
It’s Like She Had Never Existed depicts Coquis, Ana’s aunt who died the year she was born. Using archival imagery, animation, drawing and voiceover, Ana explores how the story of disability is constructed within her own family. Through Ana’s exploration of her aunt’s erasure, she asks; when does sickness becomes disability? Why does it seem like she never existed? What is it that everyone wants to erase? and why?