The Disabled Avant Garde will showcase their new interactive work, Big Screen Pong. The performance will be followed by a panel discussion exploring the relationship between the disabled artist community and ideals of competitive performance. Panellists include Lois Keidan (co-founder and co-Director of the Live Art Development Agency), Tony Heaton (Chief Executive of Shape Arts) and Marie-Anne McQuay (Curator, Spike Island).
Big Screen Pong is a fully interactive and accessible satirical take on sporting excellence. Based on the 1970s video game Pong, the big-screen version at Tate Britain invites the audience to challenge the artists to a specially adapted giant version of the game.
The Disabled Avant Garde is a satirical arts organisation formed by the disability artists Katherine Araniello and Aaron Williamson. It is concerned with creating contemporary art informed by the social model of disability. Deliberately creating confusion or inspiring debate through humorously subverting the traditional medical model stereotype of disability, the Disabled Avant Garde’s work fits the category of ‘crip humour’, that is both pitch-black and self-knowing.