Broken Hearts for the DWP x Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom
A screening featuring:
20/10/2023
19:00-21:00
ICF @ Block 336
336 Brixton Road
London SW9 7AA
Description
Note: this session will cover the issue of suicide.
This is an in-person film screening of Broken Hearts for the DWP, a short documentary by Dolly Sen, and Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom, a film by Sins Invalid.
Broken Hearts for the DWP is about how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is driving disabled people to starvation and suicide, and how disabled people are fighting back using art, love and rage. The film is about two art interventions at the DWP that protested the deaths of disabled people from current DWP policy, and includes interviews with those affected. The film is 13:49 minutes long.
Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom by Sins Invalid, the film brought 13 artists together to make evocative explorations of creation, aging and mortality. It is a journey through genesis, transformative power and earth. It was prompted by a year-long dialogue. The resulting work plunges us into visions of life and death, the disabled body/mind and liberation. The film is 156min long but we will be showing segments.
Biographies
Dolly Sen’s arts practice crosses writing, performance, film and visual art. Her work is seen as subversive, humorous and radical. Dolly is interested in debate and social experiments around themes of madness, sanity, the other, and acceptable behaviours, from an unusual and unconventional position of power. She is drawn to this because she has been labelled mad, although she thinks that her challenging of inequality and vicious systems of the “normal” world makes perfect sense. Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralising artists of color and LGBTQ+ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalised. Led by disabled people of colour, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.
Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalised. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.
They define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. They understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalisation of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)’ notions of “normal” or “functional.”
