Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture

该提案是一个展览和公众参与活动，将探讨当代雕塑如何促进视觉以外的感官参与。该展览计划于2025-6年在亨利摩尔研究所（HMI）的主要画廊举办，并将在此之前进行研究季节和延长咨询过程。虽然我们将盲人和部分失明的人确定为主要观众，但该提案不是为盲人举办的展览，而是不排除被展览边缘化的观众，因为观众无法触摸或与作品互动。该展览名为“超越视觉”，旨在增强所有观众的触觉和非视觉感官参与，这与Georgina Kleege关于“失明给艺术带来什么”的更广泛的文化价值的论点一致（Kleege 2018）。这是一种创新的知识交流形式，它扭转了既定的轨迹，并巩固了我们对一系列公众参与活动（由盲人和非盲人从业者合作提供）的态度。我们还将解决盲人和部分盲人艺术家在现有雕塑档案中的代表性不足问题（包括HMI持有的档案），并将编制盲人艺术家雕塑作品数据库，以及非盲人艺术家明确解决盲人与雕塑实践相关的启示的作品。我们还将重新审视雕塑中的“视觉性与视觉性”之争，在这样做的过程中，展览不仅寻求成为包容性的典范--面对触摸作品的禁令--而且要反驳触摸的概念，即在缺乏视觉的情况下，触摸仅仅是一种“补偿”的感觉。因此，该项目将对雕塑、触觉和失明之间的关系进行新的研究，并在此过程中重新评估什么样的实体雕塑。

The proposal is for an exhibition and public engagement activities that will explore how contemporary sculpture facilitates sensory engagements beyond the visual. The exhibition is programmed for the main galleries at the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) for 2025-6, and will be preceded by a research season and an extended consultation process. While we identify blind and partially blind people as a primary audience, the proposal is not an exhibition for the blind, but rather sets out not to exclude an audience marginalised by exhibitions where beholders are unable to touch or interact with the works. The exhibition, entitled Beyond the Visual, aims to enhance the tactile and non-visual sensory engagement of all audiences, consistent with Georgina Kleege's arguments about the wider cultural value of 'what blindness brings to art' (Kleege 2018). This constitutes an innovative form of knowledge exchange which reverses established trajectories and underpins our attitude to a whole range of public engagement activities (delivered, collaboratively, by blind and non-blind practitioners). We will also address the underrepresentation of blind and partially blind artists in existing sculpture archives (including those held by HMI), and will compile a database of sculptural works by blind artists, alongside works by non-blind artists explicitly addressing the affordances of blindness in relation to sculptural practice. We will also revisit the 'tactility versus opticality' debate within sculpture, and in so doing the exhibition seeks not only to be an exemplar of inclusivity-confronting prohibitions on touching works-but to counter the notion of touch as merely a 'compensatory' sense in the absence of vision. The project will therefore conduct new research into the relation between sculpture, touch and blindness, and in so doing re-evaluate what kind of entity sculpture is.